Time Management: The Most Important Skill

Introduction 

If you asked someone what is their most valuable possession? They would list all their money, real estate, and other possessions. However, we often forget to mention our most important resource, which is time management. The reason for its importance is very simple: money that is wasted or lost can be recovered, while we cannot recover a single second that we wasted without benefit. Therefore, time management is the skill that a person needs from birth to death. You see them making plans and visions to manage time and benefit from it. Some succeed, but the majority lose time forever.

We are not calling here for man to live like a machine that works day and night without taking into account his social and family needs. Rather, our call to care about time and organize it aims at the exact opposite. The wise management of time in the correct manner will result in improving our lifestyle, significantly increasing our achievements, and enjoying our time as a result of the balance in its distribution.

There are many pieces of advice that we have memorized since childhood regarding time: do not postpone today’s work until tomorrow, avoid distractions, stick to appointments, focus on one task at a time… etc. However, we suffer from failure in organizing our time. In this article, we will try to explore some secrets about time and managing it effectively.

Why do we fail at time management?

There are many reasons that lead to the failure of our time management plans, and perhaps the most prominent of these reasons are the following:

• Poor planning: The most important time management habits are planning, scheduling tasks, and setting deadlines for submitting work. Not paying attention to this or failing to adhere to it leads to an accumulation of work and the inability to follow up on it, which results in unparalleled stress and enormous chaos that affects our entire lives.
• Time wasters: Nowadays, the most time wasters are the electronic distractions that surround us from every side, and our lack of habit of organizing our use of them, such as: chatting, social networking sites, watching television, and engaging in electronic games.
• Busyness instead of productivity: Many people do not differentiate between the two situations, and they think that being busy indicates being productive, while the opposite is true. Mental preoccupation resulting from thinking about various matters of life, or preoccupation resulting from the accumulation of work and not completing it on time, often prevents achievement and distracts efforts, so smart people focus on completing what they have in hand instead of focusing on various concerns.
• Choosing the wrong time: A person must discover the most productive time for him, and it differs from one person to another for many reasons. Some of us are more productive in the morning, while others tend to work at night. Determining the appropriate work times for you increases the quantity and quality of what you will accomplish.

The Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, said: “There are two blessings that many people lose: health and free time.” Narrated by Al-Bukhari.

Time management skills:

The inevitable result of good time management is achieving success on the personal, academic and professional levels, and it is also an indispensable necessity for a better life in the long run. Here are some ideas through which we can manage our time effectively:

Respect time:

Do not expect any success in time management unless you show respect for time. Respecting time shows how serious and disciplined you are. It also gives others a good idea about you and earns their respect and trust. This is important at the level of individuals, institutions and peoples as well.

One of the funniest stories told in this area is the discipline of Japanese railway companies. International newspapers reported that one of the railway companies apologized to its passengers in 2017 because the train left 20 seconds early, which prompted dozens of international newspapers and millions of social media users to praise this disciplined behavior, talk about it with admiration, and compare it to railway services in other countries.

Manage yourself, not your time:

Time is limited by nature, so it is impossible to manage time. You cannot add a single second to your day in any way, so never say that you do not have enough time. The hours and minutes you have in a day are the same as those given to all the geniuses and greats throughout history!!!

Bill Gates, who has a huge fortune that puts him on the list of the world’s richest people, and has billions in his bank accounts, once said in one of his television interviews: “I can buy anything I want, but I can’t buy time.” Therefore, he is very careful to invest his time and not waste it, and he is one of the best people to hear practical advice about organizing time from.

Everyone has the same number of hours, but some people are able to accomplish more in 24 hours than others, which gives them a greater chance of achieving success and achieving the goals they have planned, while others waste the same number of hours between chatting, electronic games, and browsing social media sites.

Managing yourself means investing the time you have in the best possible way, knowing your skills and benefiting from them, focusing on your strengths, and working on improving your weaknesses to develop a better way of managing your time and life. By managing yourself, you will find that time is organized with you easily, while when you are unable to manage yourself, you will discover that you are running after time in vain.

Self-management also includes knowing your abilities and what you can do, knowing what you cannot do so that you delegate it to others, knowing what your goals and motivations are, what you want to achieve, what plans you have in place to achieve your goals, what time frame you have set to achieve that, and how serious you are about achieving success.

Prioritize:

Our lives are full of events and tasks, and without arranging them properly, our lives turn into destructive chaos. Therefore, setting priorities is one of the most important elements related to effective time management.

You have to fill your matrix of priorities by putting everything in its proper place. Do not delay the important, do not advance the trivial, do not minimize the big thing, and do not magnify the small thing.

Take some time to set your priorities, and make them as clear and simple as possible, otherwise you will waste your time on tasks that are not priorities and are not useful, and you will always remain busy instead of being productive.

There are many models that help in managing priorities effectively, including:

Eisenhower Matrix for Priority Management:

It is a matrix developed by Eisenhower to determine priorities by dividing tasks and work into four main categories: important and urgent, important but not urgent, unimportant and urgent, unimportant and not urgent. He dealt with the four categories with the following division:

1. Important and urgent tasks are completed immediately.
2. Important and non-urgent tasks are scheduled for completion.
3. Unimportant and urgent tasks are delegated to others.
4. Unimportant and non-urgent tasks are cancelled.

Sorting method:

This technique was developed in World War I by the French army, and it is a successful method for organizing time and managing priorities. The number of soldiers injured in the war exceeded the doctors’ ability to treat them, so this method was invented to provide medical care to everyone in a way that ensures saving the largest number of soldiers, by dividing the wounded into three groups:

• The first group : consists of soldiers who are terminally ill and likely to die no matter how much medical care they get, so they are put aside to die in peace.
• The second group : consists of soldiers who have only minor wounds, and will survive whether they receive immediate treatment or not, and are also set aside to wait for the last group to be finished.
• The third group : It consists of soldiers who cannot survive unless they are treated immediately. This is the group that the doctors and nurses focused their attention on and began to provide treatment to.

To manage your time well, you can divide your priorities using the same methodology:

1. Tasks that can be cancelled without causing harm.
2. Tasks that can be postponed, after completing the most important ones.
3. Tasks that must be done immediately and without any delay, and which are what you should focus your attention on.

Everything you learn about the importance of time management, the best tips, time management techniques and tools used in managing priorities, cannot make a difference unless you have the real intention to make a change in the way you deal with time, while working on improving the habits of focus, commitment, accuracy, discipline, and patience.

Time management apps and programs:

Thanks to smartphones, smart watches, and the proliferation of time management apps and programs, you can reach advanced levels of time management and productivity by employing these tools and mastering their use.

Using the right digital tools can help you organize tasks, ideas, and projects, and remind you of tasks according to their priorities throughout the day.

For example, Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint can be used to organize and share ideas, articles, and projects within an organization or company to access the ideas and contributions of others.

Entrepreneurs are advised to use apps that use the Pomodoro Technique, a time management method that uses a timer to divide work time into 25-minute intervals, separated by short breaks. This method is based on the idea of ​​frequent breaks that can improve quick thinking and focus.

There are also many different programs, applications and tools that can help you manage and organize your time efficiently. For example, the FocusMe application is an ideal tool for organizing time and achieving focus and productivity throughout the day, as the application contains the best features for blocking websites and applications that cause distraction.

If you want to know what you're spending your time on the Internet, RescueTime will send you weekly reports to point out the things that are stealing your time, and provides tools to help you be more productive.

You can also use Mind42 or other mind mapping tools to help you create to-do lists, brainstorm ideas, organize events, and other things that organize your time and boost your productivity.

There are many lessons that can be learned from the experiences of others in time management, but the most important thing is to create your own way that suits the nature of your work and your personal life, to achieve a high degree of creativity, productivity and balance.