Having read a lot about time management, I realize how essential is to determine what are the real useful things we should focus on. If we fail to analyze how we spend of time, we might never find out we always spend our time doing tasks of no real value.

Back in the days I used to work at a company managing the Adwords accounts.  If you know Adwords you know how confusing it can be at the beginning! Well part of my job was tweaking the system and then I wasted a lot of time generating reports.  A LOT of time, until I finally found out that it was pointless - I was generating reports that didn’t serve me and that others won’t see. In other words, I was wasting my time doing useless tasks.

Surely, this is not the only time I found myself doing that.  We always tend to lose a lot of time in many aspects of our lives and most of the time without even noticing it.  Can’t we change things, is it possible to learn to focus only on useful things?

Yes! In fact this is a crucial point when integrating time management techniques and systems in your life. The best way to do it is by keeping a journal or a log of all the things you do throughout the day.  At first don’t think about it, just note for a week everything you do.  Once the week has passed, it is time to start analyzing.  What you are looking for are the things you do that are not really useful - even if they are nice.

As you do this, you’ll start finding a lot of things that were not necessary or useful to do - such as my Adwords reports. You need to take those out and you will end up with a list of the essential tasks you need to do each day. Warning:  once you do it you’ll feel much freer!

Filed under: Student Time Management

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