This section of Life Skills introduces you time management skills. These are the simple, practical techniques that have helped most of the leading people reach the pinnacles of their careers.

The skills taught here help you become highly effective, by showing you how to identify and focus on the activities that give you the greatest returns. Doing this will save you time, helping you work smarter, not harder. These techniques help you beat work overload – a key source of stress.

The below key areas will help you find specific skills, and you can skim through effective time management
? prioritization
?? Scheduling
??Time Management Challenges
?? Concentration and Focus
?? Goal Setting
?? Self-Motivation

1. Prioritization
Prioritization is the essential skill you need to make the very best use of your own efforts and those of your team. It’s also a skill that you need to create calmness and space in your life so that you can focus your energy and attention on the things that really matter.

It is particularly important when time is limited and demands are seemingly unlimited. It helps you to allocate your time where it is most-needed and most wisely spent, freeing you and your team up from less important tasks that can be attended to later or quietly dropped.

With good prioritization (and careful management of deprioritized tasks) you can bring order to chaos, massively reduce stress, and move towards a successful conclusion. Without it, you’ll flounder around, drowning in competing demands.

2 .Scheduling
Scheduling is the process by which you look at the time available to you, and plan how you will use it to achieve the goals you have identified. By using a schedule properly, you can: Understand what you can realistically achieve with your time. Plan to make the best use of the time available. Leave enough time for things you absolutely must do. Preserve contingency time to handle ‘the unexpected’. Minimize stress by avoiding overcommitment to yourself and others.

3. Time Management Challenges
Maintain focus. Keep control of your time. Everyday interruptions at work can be a key barrier to managing your time effectively and, ultimately, can be a barrier to your success. Think back to your last workday, and consider for a minute the many interruptions that occurred. There may have been phone calls, emails, hallway conversations, colleagues stopping by your office, or anything else that unexpectedly demanded your attention and, in doing so, distracted you from the task athand.

Because your day only has so many hours in it, a handful of small interruptions can rob you of the time you need to achieve your goals and be successful in your work and life.

More than this, they can break your focus, meaning that you have to spend time re-engaging with the thought processes needed to successfully complete complex work.

The key to controlling interruptions is to know what they are and whether they are necessary, and to plan for them in your daily schedule.

The tips that follow will help you do that, and so prevent interruptions from frustrating you and jeopardizing your success.

4. Concentration and Focus
How many times have you sat at your desk and tried to focus on a task, only to find that your mind is wandering? Despite your best intentions, you just can’t concentrate. We’ve all been in this familiar, frustrating situation, and it’s something that can really undermine your performance.

Your personal work environment plays a large role in your ability to concentrate. The more comfortable and welcoming your environment is, the easier it will likely be for you to stay there and focus.
Make sure that you’re comfortable – Start by ensuring that your chair and desk are at the right height for you to work comfortably. If your chair is too high or your desk is too low, you’ll be uncomfortable, and you’ll be tempted to use this as an excuse to get up and walk away Some useful TIPS for effective and concentration & focus:
Nutrition - Follow some simple nutritional tips:
Drink water
Eat breakfast
Get up and move around
Mindset
Focus on one task at a time
Close your email box and chat program
Switch between high- and lowattention tasks
Prioritize
Take short breaks
Do your hardest tasks when you’re most alert
Use a phone headset
Promise yourself a reward
Schedule email downloads

5. Goal Setting
Many people feel as if they’re adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don’t seem to get anywhere worthwhile. A key reason that they feel this way is that they haven’t spent enough time thinking about what they want from life, and haven’t set themselves formal goals. After all, would you set out on a major journey with no real idea of your destination? Probably not!

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality.

The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You’ll also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.

Goal setting is used by top-level athletes, successful businesspeople and achievers in all fields. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life.

By setting sharp, clearly defined goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals, and you’ll see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind.

You will also raise your selfconfidence, as you recognize your own ability and competence in achieving the goals that you’ve set.
SMART Goals

A useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the SMART mnemonic. While there are plenty of variants (some of which we’ve included in parenthesis), SMART usually stands for:
S - Specific (or Significant).
M - Measurable (or Meaningful).
A - Attainable (or Action-Oriented).
R - Relevant (or Rewarding).
T - Time-bound (or Trackable).

6. Self-Motivation
Wanting to do something and motivating yourself to actually do it are two different things. So, what’s the difference between those who never reach their goals, year after year, and those who
achieve one goal after another?

Often, it’s their self-motivation. Self-motivation is the force that keeps pushing us to go on – it’s our internal drive to achieve, produce, develop, and keep moving forward.

When you think you’re ready to quit something, or you just don’t know how to start, your self-motivation is what pushes you to go on.

With self-motivation, you’ll learn and grow – regardless of the specific situation. That’s why it’s such a fundamental tool for reaching your goals, achieving your dreams, and succeeding, in this journey we call life.