Do it now: Time Management is all about taking action

Last week's tip:

Interruptions during day are inevitable. Develop a strategy for the same.

Reminder:

Have you developed at least two mechanisms for handling interruptions?

This week's Tip:

Do it NOW. Time Management is all about taking action.

Action items:

Time Management is not just about making elaborate to-do lists and plans. Time Management is taking action. How do you know whether you are in control or not? You should be able to recognize a change in yourself towards action.

I was reading book "The Greatest Secret in the world" by Og Mandino last week. I liked the following examples about successful people who have control of their time.

Excerpt from the book:

Procrastination can be driven from your personality through the simple technique of constantly commanding yourself to get into action... and then obeying that command immediately.

Example1: You walk across your living room rug. On the rug is a piece of torn paper. The "old you" would leave it for your wife to attend to when she cleans the room. The "new you" picks it up, NOW

Example 2: The "old you" reviews his morning mail and then answers only those memos and answers only those which absolutely must be handled and puts the rest aside for later. The "new you" knowing how much time can be saved by handling every piece of correspondence only once, answers every piece, now.

--- End of Excerpt

For four years during my college I had one poster on my wall with words "DO IT NOW". This constantly kept me on my toes when I wanted to postpone any task.

Resolve to do NOW instead of postponing for latter. The moment you take action, you feel in CONTROL again.

So a simple way to know whether you are succeeding in your time management is to just ask yourself:

Am I taking action? OR Am I avoiding action?

This is a very powerful concept. My other tips to find what time each task will take is a guide to this. Once we realize that not all tasks take long time, we can jump into action and do things that take less time NOW, instead of postponing.

Compile list of such things you can do, but which you avoid taking action and act on them NOW.

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