The essence of time management training is to help you learn the best way to utilise your time. A good number of people cannot actually give an accurate and realistic account of how they are utilising their present time. Time moves by very quickly and if you don’t manage and utilise it properly, it will just slip away without you having achieved anything meaningful in the present.

Learn to monitor and utilise your time

A good time management technique is to take a typical week and closely monitor how you will spend it. It is amazing how this is such a difficult task for a good number of people to do. There is great value in this exercise as it will serve as an eye opener on how you currently manage your time. Monitor your time daily, in thirty minute increments, while taking note of how you are utilising your time at every interval. It is necessary that you perform this as you go through your normal routine and make the effort to note down there and then. Waiting a few hours after the fact doesn’t work. You will not recall exactly how you spent your time.

Analyse your time usage

The importance of this time management training technique comes with the bigger picture. At the end of the week organise the activities of the week into their major categories such as phone calls, projects appointments and others. Subsequently, sum up the overall time you spent on each category. At the end of this exercise, a good number of people are disappointed to learn that they spent quite an amount of time doing literally unimportant things.

Plan your time

The effectiveness of time management training encourages you to use your knowledge and plan to create the situations you desire. As you realise how your time is being spent presently it is possible to change your future by making adequate plans on how to utilize your time more appropriately. To use your time in a more effective way, you need to make a conscious plan on time usage. Scheduling appointments and activities in their order of priority and using the help of your calendar or scheduler to track schedules in order to ensure that you are sticking to your plan.

Plan for the unexpected

It may not be possible to influence the unexpected, but it is possible to influence how you respond to the unexpected. With your new planned schedules and appointment tracking which shows how you will consciously spend your time, you can confidently handle the unexpected. As the unexpected shows up (which is certain), you can revisit your calendar or scheduler and see if the unexpected can fit in, and also work out the priority it will receive.