By: Dr. Donald E. Wetmore
The underlying core of my more than 2,000 Time Management presentations during the last thirty years has been the concept of “balance.” Success in managing our time has less to do with the tools available to us, such as “to do lists” and techniques for delegation, as it has to do with achieving daily balance in our lives. If we are not in balance to begin with, we are likely to sabotage our success. Successful Time Management then has a lot to do with what we are not doing.
Here’s my list of the seven best ways for “Maintaining Daily Balance.”
- Take Time for Your Health. There are many programs available to maintain your personal health. Select the ones that are appropriate for you. Whatever you chose, they will all have one common ingredient: Time. Take the time to care for yourself. Schedule exercise and give it the same priority you would give to a business meeting or a social engagement. Plan to eat correctly. Listen to music and enjoy a laugh. If we don’t take time for health and fitness today, we have to take time for sickness and illness tomorrow. It’s not a question of “whether or not” we will spend time in this area. The question is “where.”
- Give Your Family What They Deserve. A Funeral Director friend of mine told me that never met a widow who complained that her late husband spent too little time at work. Schedule “special time” with your children. Bring home a surprise rose. Leave a note under someone’s pillow. Send a recent snapshot of you to a long distance relative. Plan regular phone contact with those you don’t see so often. Be a proactive family leader as good as you are a proactive business leader. The actions we take today form the memories we will re-live and enjoy tomorrow.
- Take Control of Your Financial life. If you take one hour per day of independent study, in less than four years, you can become a world-class expert in the topic of your choice or develop a successful home-based business, or create an investment plan that will give you financial freedom so that work is no longer a “have to” but a “want to” and is no longer a necessity for your personal financial survival. Maybe take the time from some of that TV time that doesn’t enhance our future all that much and re-direct it as an investment in our future.
- Develop Your Intellectual Area. Half of what is known today, we did not know fifteen years ago. If you and I continue to do what we do, the same way, in five years, most of us will become obsolete. I work with many “downsized” employees who lost their employment not because they were not working “hard enough,” but because they failed to take some of their current time to improve their skills and talents in this fluid world and soon their employer and the world did not need what they did so well.
- Enjoy a Quality Social Life. Seek out and make friends with the people who will have positive effects in your life. Don’t just settle for who is around you. Now, I believe everyone deserves our love and respect but our friendship and time belong to those whom we are free to choose.
- Maximize Your Professional Life. Don’t just do the job for a paycheck, as a way of trading your time for money. Make whatever you do personally fulfilling and satisfying, no matter where you are and what you do. One very successful businessperson told me he never held a “job,” he had always held a “position.” He understood right from the beginning of his career, when he was parking cars, then waiting on tables that these were always opportunities to advance to the next level if through every assignment he sought to make the world a little bit better.
- Enjoy Your Spiritual Area. This area involves not only formal religious practice but also our relationships to one another, our communities, and our environment. It would be sad to believe we were put here only to survive and then die. What is your special role in this Universe?
Would you like to receive free Timely Time Management Tips on a regular basis to increase your personal productivity and get more out of every day? Sign up for your free “Timely Time Management Tips” newsletter at our website: https://www.balancetime.com
Dr. Donald E. Wetmore
Certified Executive Coach, Consultant and Trainer
Author, “Organizing Your Life” and “The Productivity Handbook”
Productivity Institute
Personal Productivity Solutions to Leverage Your Impact
127 Jefferson St.
Stratford, CT 06615
(203) 386-8062
(800) 969-3773
info@balancetime.com
https://www.balancetime.com
Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timemanagement
Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/timeguy
Copyright 2018 You may re-print the above information in its entirety in your publication, newsletter, or on your webpage. For permission, please email your request for “reprint” to: info@balancetime.com