Isn’t it strange, how some people seem to have all the time in the world, while others struggle regularly to steal five minutes from doing one thing just to start doing another? Some of us seem to cope with any number of tasks no matter what, while others feel depressed even if they have only 2 tasks to complete on a given day.

Most of the reasons behind such examples of success and failure can be easily deducted from basic time management techniques employed, and today I’m going to share with you some basic principles of time management success.

Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Gleb Reys, and I’m the owner of [1] Personal Development Ideas blog.

I maintain three blogs, which requires posting new articles on them at least a few times a week. I have a regular full-time job as a Unix systems administrator. I’ve been happily married since 2001. Our little daughter has recently turned 1 year old, and if you don’t have any children yourself - trust me on this one: they need all the time you’ve got and a bit on top of that. Still, I’m very happy with my life, and believe to have maintained a healthy balance in my activities.

Part of my success is due to thoughtful time management. There are a few principles I try to live by, and I believe you can benefit from using them as well. They’re universal, which means you can use them in both professional and personal activities of yours.

Healthy balance

One of the basic principles of being happy is to have a balanced life. Speaking of any changes you’re going to make, be it a different time management approach, some physical activity, or anything else for that matter - you need to maintain a healthy balance of activities if you want to keep them for life.

Only approaches which you can maintain in long-term can be truly successful. That’s why the first principle of an effective time management is this: maintain healthy balance. There are many benefits of staying faithful to this principle, check out the [2] Too Busy To Exercise article for a few examples.

Planning

Once you have a rough idea of how balanced your activities should be, it’s time to get started with your planning.

In time management, planning means creating detailed to-do lists for all your actions.

Having a list of things to do on a given day, week, month or even a year is an absolute must: unless you have tasks written down, you can never tell how successful you are. No matter how much you accomplish, there will always be this feeling of having forgotten to do something else, possibly something very important. Make it your habit: write your plans down!

The reason for such plans to be detailed is this: once you have a list of things to do, you want to get a rough idea of how much you’re going to spend working on each one of them. Without doing such a forecast, you can’t really decide how much work you can take on. Spending just a few minutes to assess your tasks list is definitely worth doing, because it helps you get ready for the next stage of managing your time.

Prioritization

Naturally, not all tasks of yours are of equal importance or urgency. That’s why you always need to prioritize.

Some people do it automatically while applying previously described principles, and that is how you will be doing it eventually as well, but initially just make it part of your daily time management routine - once you know what tasks you have and how much time you think they will take you to do, prioritize to have an ordered tasks list and to know exactly what to do first.

Progress tracking

The last vital principle I use is to always track progress. I’ll be writing a separate article on this topic in the coming weeks on [1] my blog, so stay tuned.

For the moment though, I’ll tell you this: maintaining a balance and planning are the two principles to ensure your long-term success, while prioritization and progress tracking are mostly targeted at your short-term efforts.

Progress tracking must be an essential part of your time management routine. Depending on your tasks, you may have to track your progress on an hourly or daily basis. One of the primary goals with progress tracking is to ensure you have an overview of all the efforts, and see exactly what you’ve completed and what’s still left to be done.

Quite often, actions take longer periods of time than originally planned, and progress tracking ensures you know your situation and resort to prioritizing based on your progress. For instance, if you’re not making enough progress on a particular task, you should probably give it a higher priority, even before it becomes a real issue.

So there you have it: a few simple but powerful steps of making your time management a success. Start with these basics, use the approaches to make tweaks in your daily activities, and you’re bound to see an improvement. Good luck!

If you liked this article, you’re very welcome to explore my blog: [3] Personal Development Ideas.