Decisions that you make, like going to bed early and getting a good night sleep, have an inordinate impact on the quality of your day. When you are fully rested, you produce far more high quality work than when you are tired 365
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because you have not slept enough. When you are fully rested, you make better decisions which lead to better results. When you are tired, you often make poor decisions which lead to mistakes and misunderstandings that have to be dealt with or remedied, often at great cost. Fatigue is an enormous time waster.
Eat Well for High Energy
What you eat and when you eat can have a major impact on your levels of energy. When you eat a high quality breakfast and a high quality lunch, you will be brighter and more alert throughout the day. You will be sharper and have more energy. You will be more creative and confident. You will make better decisions and get better results when you are properly nourished. The practice of eating lightly, and avoiding sugars, salts and fatty foods, will assure that you have more brain energy, and that you are more effective, than if you consume foods that are not particularly good for you.
Teach Your Children Time Power
Make a good time management a part of your family life. Teach your children good work habits by helping them with their homework and insisting that it be done promptly, before they do anything else. In more than 8,000 studies of men and women who became high-achievers early in life, one of the consistent factors they found was that their parents were concerned about and involved in their children’s homework. The more that children think that their parents care about them completing homework on time, the more committed the children become to doing good schoolwork.
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This habit of doing good work, and getting it done promptly, then extends into adult life.
Take Time Off to Rest and Relax
In keeping your life in balance, relaxing is often the most valuable use of your time. Sometimes, the most important thing you can do is nothing. Take at least one or two days off from work each week, and resolve to do nothing work related on those days. Take the time to smell the roses.
Go for a walk with your spouse, your children or your friends. Take time to sit back, to think, reflect, and to adjust your goals and priorities. Make sure that your daily activities are consistent with your deepest convictions. Be sure that your goals and priorities are congruent with your values.
Take time regularly to think about what is really important to you, and to make sure that the outer aspects of your life are consistent and harmonious with the inner aspects.
You Can Only Manage Yourself
Finally, in developing your philosophy of time management, continually remind yourself that you cannot manage time. You can only manage yourself. Time management is life management. Time management requires self-control, self-mastery and self-discipline. Time management behaviors and disciplines are skills that you can learn through practice and repetition.
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In time you, your ability to manage yourself and your life will become automatic and easy.
Time management is a lifestyle that must be practiced every hour, everyday, all the days of your life. It is the one habit, the one discipline that is essential to everything else you want to achieve. With excellent time management skills and practices, there are no limits.
“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this something, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
(Marie Curie)
Action Exercises:
1. Think long term; project forward five and ten years and design your perfect life in every respect. What does it look like?
2. Make a detailed plan today to achieve financial independence by a specific time in the future. How much will you need?
3. Do what you love to do; determine the kind of work that would make you the happiest and then organize your life to do it in an excellent fashion. What is it?
4. Examine your relationships and make sure that you would be happy where you are for the rest of your life. If not, what changes are you going to make?
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5. Take excellent care of your physical health; eat, exercise, rest and behave in such a way that you live to be 90 or older. What changes should you make in your lifestyle?
6. Change your life by doing more, less, starting or stopping things in your life to improve your results and increase your overall satisfaction. What changes are you going to make immediately?
7. Keep your life in balance by placing your family at the center of every decision and organizing everything around them. What could you do or stop doing immediately to improve the quality of your family life?