Time Management Is a Not

TIME Management is a not just a skill, it is an asset. And those who possess it must cherish it and those who don't, should try to acquire it. That is what I believe because over the years, as a student and an employee, I have seen that nothing helps you in your pursuit to be meet various deadlines than the skill of time management. Deadlines, as much as you may dread them, nonetheless enjoy a ubiquitous presence in our lives. They are everywhere from when to submit our assignment to when to meet a certain target to when to come back from vacation. Had it not been for deadlines, man would have always asked for "just a little more time." Its human nature to postpone and delay the unpleasant tasks and by unpleasant I am not referring to tasks which are anti-social or immoral in any sense but rather work that we would have someone else do for us.

For example how many of us really enjoy working on an assignment or returning from a vacation for that matter? If we were left to our wishes, we would always want to stay on that vacation, have someone else do our assignments, wash our laundry and take care of preparing our meals. No wonder, fast food is such a huge industry. Well jokes apart, time management is a skill that I learned during my first year at college. This is when I realized that away from home, I no longer had the every-present assistance of my mother at my disposal. She would not take care of other stuff while I pretended to study and suddenly 24 hours in a day were not enough anymore. I started waking up early only to realize that instead of more waking hours in a day, what I needed was to organize myself -- and my schedule in such a way as to make sure that everything was finished on time.

That's when I learned that the best thing to do is to make a list of all the work that just had to be done on a particular day. By the end of the day, I would have most of them done or at least started and this would give an amazing sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. With this power, I just fell in love with the list-making activity. Every day I would wake up, prepare a realistic list of tasks that had to be finished that day and this allowed me to get a majority of them done by the end of the day. I began feeling more productive and since then I have began a staunch advocate of time management.

Time Management skills are not specialized or exclusive to a certain group, instead every single person needs to acquire them in order to make themselves more productive and to get more out of their day. You may not read it anywhere but time management is closely connected with sense of achievement and success, which further boosts your self-confidence and makes a more effective person, student, and employee on the whole. This is my personal experience and I know how time management has helped me get more done and how this has led to success in various ways. There is a simple Pareto Principle very famous for its advocacy of time management. This principle states that 80% of work can be done with 20% of effort so if we apply 80% of effort, imagine what we can achieve. In fact I am so sure of the effectiveness of time management skills when learned properly and applied that I feel every student must attend a time management course when they start their college. It should be made a mandatory course because not everyone has the same drive to get things done on time but almost every single person wishes they were more effective and productive. For those of us who were not naturally driven to manage time, a course in time management would prove immensely valuable.

It is believed that no one really wants to procrastinate but there is always a reason they end up doing this. Either they find the task unpleasant or simply overwhelming. In both cases, what we need to remember is that this task just has to be done so why not get it out of our way sooner than later. With this in mind, it is important to break down the task into simple steps and accomplish it one at a time. Similarly the unpleasantness of the task can be overlooked if we focus on what we can achieve once it is over and done with.