Time Management Skills for Distance Learning

As a busy professional, it is vitally important to manage your time. There are some broad principles, approaches, that you need to learn and apply. The first is to take the view that your time is precious, and should not be wasted. By the way, relaxation time, leisure time, relationship time is not "wasted", it's important, valuable time that you need to plan into your life. These broad principles include, you need to take control. That is, to take control of your time and the way in which you approach the activities that you have to be involved in, such as work activities and family commitments, and ensure that there is also time in your life for the personal activities that you wish to be involved in, such as leisure and relaxation activities. You need to plan ahead. This is vital. Being successful means being busy, and to manage being busy you need to plan ahead. You don't have to perform at "genius" level. If you work hard and as efficiently as you reasonably can, you are doing well. You need to prioritise. You need to rank activities into an order where you can see which activities, what work, which tasks, are the most important and need urgent attention or a specific amount of time spent on them, and which activities are less important and can be pushed back, or worked on over a longer period, or delegated to others, or even abandoned.

Look at your current situation. This is important. You need to evaluate, to analyse, to consider, what condition are you in now? how well, how poorly, do I manage my time at the moment?. The only way to do this effectively is to maintain a log, a diary, a record, of what activities you are involved in, how much time you spend on them, how many interruptions do you suffer from, how many targets do you achieve, how many targets/deadlines do you miss, what activities (work, personal, family, social) are you not involved in which you would have liked to be involved in?. The way to evaluate this is to keep a log, a record, ideally for a month, but if that's too long, then at least for an absolute minimum of a week. Try to keep this record for at least two weeks, and if there are "unusual" events, disturbances, interruptions, that do occur occasionally or irregularly, that haven't occurred during the period that you have kept your log, then make a note of them.

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