Can the Intangible be Managed?

Managing the Intangible – Time: Eliminating Time Wasters

Stop and think about it; few things are as valuable as “time”.  One can achieve great success, fortune, friendship, and love but time rules all of these. We control our achievements in life.  We can expand them or reduce them. We can set our sights on earning more money or connecting with others and expand our circle of those closest to us.  But time, is time. We simply cannot make more of it than there is. Each of us has a finite amount of it and its value is ever increasing. The good news is in spite of its illusiveness, time can still be managed. We can choose to see time as a controllable commodity and live our lives according to that assumption. This is one of the secrets of successful people ‑ they work at shaping those things which others think are uncontrollable. There are a number of ways to manage our time.  Eliminating time wasters is one of them.

ELIMINATING TIME WASTERS

Time wasters come from ourselves and those around us.  Some are unavoidable, but reducible nonetheless. What are the most frequent sources of time wasters in your day?  Here’s a list of time wasters. Many researchers find the same handful at the top of their lists, which means these are problems common to all of us:

1.  Scheduling less important work before more important work.

2.  Starting a job before thinking it through.

3.  Leaving jobs before they are completed.

4.  Doing things that can be delegated to another person.

5.  Doing things that can be delegated to modern equipment.

6.  Doing things that actually aren’t a part of your real job.

7.  Keeping too many, too complicated, or overlapping records.

8.  Handling too wide a variety of duties.

9.  Failing to build barriers against interruptions.

10. Allowing conferences and discussions to wander.

11. Conducting unnecessary meetings, visits, and/or phone calls.

12. Chasing trivial data after the main facts are in.

13. Socializing at great length between tasks.

 One can’t actually make time but we can make our time more productive by not wasting it.