Learning time management skills is easy.

The challenge comes when you try to make these skills a part of your life.

In my work as a professional coach, I frequently see people who got excited, tried it for a while, then got stressed and gave up.

When you work on learning time management skills and integrating them into your daily routine, here are a few tips to boost your odds of success.

1. Use a Holistic System

Whatever systems you use, you'll want a plan for managing three main things:

*Your Priorities: You'll need a way to get clear about what's most important to you. More importantly, you'll want to make sure you use these clear priorities to plan annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily.

*Your Energy: The better you feel, the better you perform. Your efforts will be more successful if you eat right, exercise, and get plenty of rest. It might seem strange to discuss this in a time management article, but managing your energy is a key step to high performance.

*"Stuff" Coming at You (Including To Do Items, Events, Physical Stuff): In the modern world we face a constant flood of "stuff" coming at us. You'll need to develop a nimble personal triage system for handling events, emails, to-dos, and constantly shifting schedules.

Without any of these three pieces, a time management system will fail. For example, if you know your priorities but cannot manage the 500 emails a day you receive, you'll feel overwhelmed. On the other hand, if you manage your email well but neglect your priorities, you'll feel completely unsatisfied.

2. Identify the Most Effective Activities

When learning skills for managing your time, you'll want to few activities that drive most of your success. More specifically, a few simple and quick activities can take you 80% of the way there. So find the activities that really work for you. And the cut out the rest.

3. Practice, Practice, Practice

Theories about managing your time are not much use. The real value comes in applying them to your life, building new habits, and making them a seamless part of your daily routine. Like anything - sports, music, dance - you must practice in order to perform at a high level.

As the saying goes, "You haven't learned it until it's in the muscle."

Good luck!