Productivity depends on time management skills or effectively optimizing how you spend the hours of your day to accomplish as much as possible. While a hectic schedule and seemingly endless lists of responsibilities are often daunting and stressful, learning to organize your life according to the fundamentals of time management makes everything easier.
The driving force of time management is the goals you set for yourself. The desire to achieve them provides the motivation to carry out schedules, meet demands, push through the impulse to procrastinate and make sacrifices for effective time management. Goals need to be realistic and well defined, and you need to understand exactly what it takes to realize them.
Your goals are also what enable you to prioritize how you spend your time. How important is each task to achieving one or more of your goals? How much time will it take to do it properly? How much time will it take away from other tasks that further your objectives? When you look at what you devote your time to in this light, it often becomes immediately clear where you're wasting too much time and where you're not spending enough.
Take this information and apply it to your scheduling. You need clear, documented plans outlining how to fit everything you have to do into the finite time available each day, week, and month. Prioritize your tasks to ensure the most important are completed. This also means paying attention to the people and activities in your life that steal time from you and figuring out how to minimize or eliminate as much of that wasted time as possible. Designate some time for the unnecessary, though, as it's unhealthy to be all business all the time.
Be careful, however, not to obsess and spend too much time planning your life; writer Jared Sandberg reported in the Wall Street Journal that approximately one-third of people who use to-do lists devote more time to tending to the lists than they do to carrying out the items on them. Wasting time in such a manner is a form of procrastination, one of the greatest impediments to effective time management. Beating procrastination largely depends on the ability to say no. You have to refuse to waste time when you're supposed to be accomplishing tasks that carry you toward meeting goals. Make sure the people you interact with are aware of the times you are not to be distracted.
By setting tangible goals and focusing your efforts on accomplishing them, effective time management begins to fall into place. When your goals and priorities guide how you spend your time, many of the pressures of scheduling fall away. The more productive you find yourself being, the more drive you'll have, too. In this way, time management skills evolve, becoming easier and more natural.