How to organise yourself for daily success

To thrive in both your personal and professional life you need to organise and prioritise your workload so that you’ll be able to achieve your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly tasks and goals. Organising your time to create the right balance between work and play will not only help you to get things done, but it will also lower your stress levels and keep you in good mental and physical health. The truth of the matter is that if you are not managing your time properly, you are literally stealing time from your clients, colleagues, family, friends and of course most importantly, yourself. How does that make you feel? As you will begin to discover through the following chapters, the best way to use your time productively is to focus on the few critical and profitable tasks and goals rather than the mass of trivial ones. The way you allocate your time will absolutely depend on what the actual tasks are and when they need to be done. Either way, the first thing you need to do is to be clear about your goals and your objectives. Knowing what you want to achieve annually, monthly, weekly and on a daily basis will allow you to figure out what needs to be done.Once you know your destination, it’s then a simple matter of creating a plan to help you get there. Here is an example of a weekly timeline in MS Outlook. If you spend most of your time in front of a computer then Outlook is a great tool to use to get organised. Initially you will need to list all of your weekly activities and the tasks that need to be completed for the week. You are the best judge of just how much you can realistically achieve. Next you need to prioritise your work and delegate (if possible), or drop, any lower-value tasks to which you are not personally adding any real value. There will always be those daily items that crop up and need immediate attention. These tasks are the ones that yell out, "URGENT!" These ‘urgent’ things are often unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean that you need to lose track of the day’s key objectives. If you feel that you could be better organised, please keep reading. I’ll show you how to take much greater control of your time and your priorities on the following pages. To learn more about managing your time and priorities, visit www.success.net.au or go to www.paulpuckridge.com