Time Management - How The Right Environment Makes It Easier
Written by Michael Adams on May 10th, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
When the topic of better “time management” comes up, many people’s eyes glaze over as they mentally prepared to be bored by a conversation full of dull techniques, forcing yourself to do things that aren’t natural for you and maybe things that just aren’t fun for us to do.
Those kind of “Brute Force Time Management” techniques can work, but there are also other things you can do to help you manage your time better; things which take very little time and precious little mental will power.
Buckminster Fuller (or “Bucky Fuller” as he was called by his friends) is reported to have said “Environment is stronger than will power”. Sounds smart, doesn’t it? Consider this. If you’re out of shape and want to improve your health, how hard would that be to do if you’re locked in room full of delicious sugar cookies. On the flip side, how easy would that be to do if you lived inside of a fitness center? Pretty easy don’t you think?
Similar ideas about creating the right environment for success can be applied to almost every area of your life, but most people rarely consider their environment when they are trying to improve their time management skills. Indeed, time management is considered to be a boring topic for most because it’s somewhat of a chore to do. Let’s do a simple experiment to prove how your environment factors into your ability to manage your time better.
Sit for a moment and see what you see in your work space. Choose five obvious elements in your work space and pose yourself the following question “Does what I’m looking at right now help me reach my productivity and time management goals or get in the way of reaching those same goals?”
For each item, if it doesn’t support your goal for better time management, get rid of it or otherwise handle it appropriately.
For example, televisions are notorious for their ability to distract a person and also seduce them away from getting tasks accomplished promptly. If you have one in your workspace and can agree that it doesn’t support your better time management goals, simply unplug it or better yet, move it to a different room.
Another distraction can be something as simple as a pile of papers on your desk. Clearly they are important because you’ve “piled” them up on your desk. The real question to ask is whether that pile supports your time management goals or not. When it’s time to find something in that pile, chances are you’ll have to spend a bit of extra time digging through all the papers to find the one you want. You may even spill the papers on to the floor at some point, causing you to waste time having to pick them all up.
These two examples might seem silly, but you get the point. Eliminating the non-supportive elements in your environment is the first step to creating an environment that supports your goals to be better at time management.
After eliminating the elements from your environment which do not support your productivity and time management goals, the next step will be to actually add things to your environment which make it easier to manage your time. We share tips on how to do this in some of my other articles.
Tags: Self-Improvement