6 Best Ways to Manage Your Time

1. Make a list. To balance your time between work, family, and personal interests, make a list of the top 10 things you want to do in the next 12 months.

2. Make a daily activity log. Once every hour, write down how you're spending that time. Then ask yourself, "Is this the most productive use of my time?" If it is, continue what you are doing. If it isn't, make the necessary changes. Notice how much more aware you become of how you use your time as you continue to fill out your daily log.

   You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.

   —Charles Buxton,
   statesman, writer, and social reformer

3. Do not do things by rote. Swami Sivananda once said, "Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even into your smallest acts. This is the secret of success." Keep your awareness sharp and make every moment count. Be careful about how you spend your time. The most successful endeavors are those in which the greatest care has been spent on details.

   Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.

   —P.T. Barnum,
   showman and entrepreneur

4. Rearrange your environment. Are you convinced you're managing time well because you're doing things the way they've always been done? It may be you're just taking the easy way out. You don't have to make major changes to be more efficient; make minor adjustments. Simply moving a file cabinet or changing your filing system may make a huge difference. And if it doesn't work out, you can always put things back the way they were.

5. Customize your time management method. There are many useful time management tools and programs on the market today. One of them may work perfectly for you. But none of them work perfectly for everyone. Find one—or create one yourself—that is best suited for you as an individual. Every high achiever I've met has an individual system that he or she has devised to help manage time. Some are complicated, some are as simple as a little black book. The system you use is less important than using a system that works for you.

6. Do a pre- and post-evaluation of each of your days. In the morning, before you even start your day, visualize what you want to accomplish, what your goals are, who you are meeting. What outcomes would you like to see? How can you make the best use of your time each day based on what it is you want to accomplish? At the end of the day, review what you did accomplish and what you need to do tomorrow.

   Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year—and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!

   —Anthony Robbins,
   author