Just get on with it

By Teresa Peters.

Do you ever feel like there's not enough time in the day?

We all get the same 24 hours – so why do some people seem to achieve more with their time than others? The answer: good time management, or as I like to call it – attention management

Time management is the process of organising and planning how to divide your time between different activities. Get it right, and you'll work smarter, not harder, to get more done in less time – even when time is tight and pressures are high.

You can unlock many benefits when you know how to manage your time effectively. These include:

• Greater productivity and efficiency.
• Less stress.
• A better professional reputation.
• Increased chances of advancement.
• More opportunities to achieve your life and career goals.
• And by feeling happier, more relaxed, and better able to think, you're in a great place to help others reach their targets, too.

I invite you to grab a pen and paper and consider this time management tool that I'm about to share with you. It's called the Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle, and you can read more about this in Steven covey's famous book 7 habits for highly effective people. It helps you quickly identify the activities that you should focus on and the ones you should ignore.

When you use this tool to prioritise your time, you can simultaneously deal with genuinely urgent issues as you work towards important, longer-term goals.

To use the tool, list all your tasks and activities, and put each into one of the following categories. You may wish to draw four boxes.

These are:
• Important AND urgent.
• Important but NOT urgent.
• NOT important but urgent.
• NOT important AND NOT urgent.

I often combine my life well-being and work on the same to-do list. For instance, Exercise is very important and NOT urgent.

To be highly effective, 80% of our time should be spent in the important NOT urgent section.

I personally like to break this down further using a red or green pen because I have a visual learning style. Green for things I can do now and red for something I can't do without support or need to stop doing and delegate.

By listing your tasks into these four quadrants, you will create more time and manage where your attention will make the most significant impact on you, your work, and your well-being.

Good time management is about knowing what to do and when to do it.
How will you choose to manage your attention?

Teresa Peters is accredited at Senior Practitioner level with the EMCC, as an Executive Coach and Personal Performance Coach. She is also highly trained in managing teams effectively in a virtual world. She empowers Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs and Teams to find clarity, focus and transformation, both professionally and personally, using a solution-focused approach and DiSC profiling.

Accelerator Coaching offers a range of online and face to face support services using an empathic, human-centred approach combined with Teresa's corporate experience, 20 years in sales development and business acumen. She also co-founded another successful business where they've published 32 recipe books. She is an ethical coach who has 500+ hours coaching individuals and she has regular coaching herself. You can find out more about Teresa and her brilliant Accelerator Coaching here.