A weekly column by Peter Lawless; Business Growth Specialist and Coach to Entrepreneurs. peter@3r.ie

With only 24 hours in each day, how we use time to our ultimate advantage is very important to our future success and the possibility of achieving our dreams.

One of the greatest causes of stress is lack of time in which to do things, we need to do. Our stress levels always seem to rise in time constrained situations such as; producing a report to a deadline, getting the kids ready for school before work or just finding time to relax.

The word ' stress ' is defined as follows; “A mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition occurring in response to adverse external influences and capable of affecting physical health, usually characterized by increased heart rate, a rise in blood pressure, muscular tension, irritability, and depression.”

Remove the greatest source of stress in modern living.

Could you just imagine, what your life would be like, if you had no time constraints. Yet, I am sure you look around yourself and see people, who seem to have time to go off and play golf, take long holidays and they always seem to have loads of money.

It is a known fact that less that 10% of the wealthy people we see or hear about, inherited it. Indeed less than .01% of rich people actually won their riches.

All of these people with wealth and time on their hands, learnt how to make time work for them. The great news is that you can too!

Time never stops; we live our lives just once with no possibility of ever getting a re-run on anything we do. So why not make a pledge with yourself today, to grab each minute greedily and make sure you use it wisely.

15 time saving strategies that success minded people use.

•  Get up 5 minutes earlier – What would you be able to do if someone gave you 26 hours, and said you could use that time to learn a new skill, or engage in a pastime you had always wanted to do. That is what 5 minutes a day would give you in a year. If you get up 5 minutes earlier each week for 6 weeks, that would be ½ an hour – do it for 12 and it is a full hour. That is 15 extra 24 hour days a year you would get. Don't worry about the extra sleep, if you were to spend ½ an hour a day exercising, you would need less than 6 ½ hours sleep per night. That is a proven fact.

•  Review your goals! – I am going to make the assumption that you are reading this article, to gain extra time to achieve some goals. If you don't have any, then go and set some. Reviewing your goals every day, makes wanting to achieve them a habit. It also focuses your mind tremendously for the day ahead.

•  Create a daily action list! – Having read through your goals, create your “to do list”. This should be a brain dump of everything you can think of that you wish to do. Some of the items may be future based, don't worry write them down and I will tell you what to do with the list next.

•  Prioritise your actions – Now you should review your list, and put an x beside all the actions that you can do today, that will bring you closer to achieving your goals. All of the other items, should be delegated, scheduled or recorded as “do later if they become important later”. For the actions that you marked as definite today-to-dos, you should estimate how much time each will take and priorities them.

•  Check how you actually spent your time – We all make estimates, and the more we do, the better we should get as long as we record our actual results. Keeping a list of what we actually spend our time doing is hugely constructive. It clearly identifies how long we actually take doing things we want to do and also how much time we spend doing things we should not do.

•  Create special times for special tasks – Many people get email today by the bucket load. And they spend all day doing dealing with it. They get sidetracked and end up doing 3 out of 10 things on their lists. Stop, set aside 2 to 3 times a day to respond to email and spend the rest of the time focusing on your priorities. If something was really urgent, there are always phones!

•  Delegate tasks that other can do – We are all good at some things and not so good at others. Do not spend your time doing things that will take you 10 hours and someone else 1 hour to do. Either delegate the task or swap it with some task that you can do well; both parties can gain this way.

•  Schedule future activities – Sometimes things that are not a priority now, still need to get done. The classic we all remember is the school project to hand in at the end of the holidays. The mad panic that ensues the day before we went back to school seemed to destroy all memories of the break we enjoyed. Scary thing is, that as adults, we still do the same, we leave everything to the last minute, do a rush job and produce sub-standard work. Scheduling to have jobs completed ahead of schedule, will reduce your stress, save you time and improve the quality of your work.

•  Do it now! – If it is on your list, just do it right now. Procrastination is the biggest killer of dreams that exists today. Just imagine the feeling of getting a job finished that you really did not want to do. Not having it hanging over your head, will reduce your stress considerably and give you a clearer mind to do the other things you want to do so much better.

•  Say No! – We all like to please the boss, so when we are asked to do something extra, we just say yes, to avoid a difficult situation. But how difficult is the situation going to be when you can't get everything done. You did say yes after all, so you have no excuse. Learning to say no, can be one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself. People will also learn to respect you a lot more, as the work you do complete will be of a much higher standard and always on time.

•  Finish what you start – The more that you manage to discipline yourself to work non-stop on a single task, the more high quality work you will get done in less time. Each time you stop working you break this cycle of efficiency. This means that you take a lot longer to produce work that is sub-standard from a job you should have excelled at.

•  Learn a new skill – If you spend your time writing reports, or producing articles, learning how to type faster would rapidly increase your output. This would ensure that you get more work done in less time. The same would be true of any skill you could master, that would make task completion quicker. Another example might be a student mastering memory techniques, to reduce study time and improve grades.

•  Remove junk food for the brain – How often have you come in from work, got something out of the fridge, and plonked yourself down in front of the TV and vegged out all night? This is fine if there is something specific you wanted to watch, or if you had nothing better to do with your time. If you can delay time wasting gratification until you have completed everything you should be doing you will not only enjoy the TV, guilt free, you will also have got closer to achieving your goals.

•  Optimise down time – Dublin traffic is a night mare, and causes untold billions of Euro in wasted productivity. So don't just sit there cursing, listening to some radio show that is aimed at people who are not that pushed at improving their wealth standing. Make those phone calls you could be making on your hands free phone or listen to some self improvement CDs or podcasts.

•  Take a break – School classes are set at 45 minutes for a reason. To function properly, the human brain needs to take breaks of up to 10 minutes every hour. Stand up, stretch or make a phone call, to give the brain a chance to rest. When you resume your task, you will be twice as efficient in the next 45 minutes, than if you had just ploughed on.

The minutes that time gives to all of us are equal, yet what each person does with that minute is a choice that only they can make.

You made a choice to read this article, review and learn the tips and put them into action.

Learning only becomes knowledge when experience is gained from the active application of the lesson by the student.

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