The 25 Best Time Management Tips

I've scoured the internet for the best time management tips and the list below are common to probably all the sites I looked at. I googled "time management" and looked at all the sites that came up on the first two pages. Here are the 25 best time management tips I could find:

1. Keep a time log. You need to know exactly where all your time goes. Track every 15 minutes for a week from waking up to bedtime. Where do you actually spend your time?
2. Estimate the cost of your time. You need to calculate how much each hour costs. Divide your salary (gross not net, if you have a large variable element use last year's amount) by your working days (usually 220) then divide by 8. This is how much you cost per hour. It should scare you!
3. Know your values. Understanding what is important to you is critical for effective time management. Choose three values that resonate with you. These are the things that motivate you. Maybe it is wealth. Maybe freedom. Maybe adventure. Maybe helping others. Get three and assess all your activities against them. 
4. Create a vision of how you want to live your life. More time with the family? More travel? What is your ideal life? Imagine that money is no longer a worry. How would you live your life? This will show you what is important to you really. Draw it. How are you living your life ideally?
5. Plan your time. Allocate time to your activities before you do them. If you have to write something, give yourself a set amount of time to do it in before you start. For example, I gave myself an hour to write this post.
6. Set goals and plan back from them. You need six-month, one-year and three-year goals. The earlier goals should be milestones to the long term ones. Only have three substantial goals not lots of small ones.
7. Prioritize. If it is not contributing to achieving one of your goals then either cut it completely or cut the amount of time you spend on it to the bare minimum.
8. Use a personal planning system. Whether electronic or paper doesn't matter. But you need to manage your time in a systematic recorded way. I use outlook calendar which works fine for me. 
9. Organize your work space and files.  You need to have a clear system for organizing and filing both your computer files and any paper files you use. A good test is timing how long it takes to find something. I once spent 30 minutes searching for a file on my computer!
10. Throw or give away things you no longer need or use. We keep way too much stuff and it makes organization harder. Every three months have a clear out. If you haven't needed to use something in that period, get rid of it unless there is a very strong reason not to.
11. Delegate. Expensive staff should do expensive tasks! Cheaper ones should do cheaper ones. Look at your necessary but non-priority tasks. These should be delegated down where possible.
12. Manage email more effectively. 100 emails a day is not uncommon for many jobs. Set two times a day when you will check it and deal with it as you read it. Don't mark for later follow up. Handle it in the set time. Don't keep checking. Twice a day is enough. 
13. Have a clean desk. Untidy desk means an untidy mind. Put everything away at the end of the day. Use notebooks for notes not loose paper. 
14. Don't procrastinate. Know your energy levels and plan to do hard tasks when your energy is highest. Also get the difficult stuff done first thing in the morning. 
15. Say no to non-priority requests. Always hard to do but being dragged into projects that are not contributing to your main goals is a real threat to effective time management. Say no. 
16. Be punctual. It is lazy work practice to be late and messes up your planning. Set your watch to 10 minutes earlier than the real time. Start and finish on time. 
17. Cut unnecessary information. The only information you need is that which directly contributes to achieving your goals. Be ruthless here. You can only read so much. Cut out everything which doesn't help.
18. Have a strategy to manage interruptions. Even if you do everything in this list, interruptions can undermine their effectiveness. Set a time every day when it is OK to be interrupted. Direct peers and your team to interrupt you only at this time unless it is an emergency.
19. Don't multi-task. Actually multi-tasking doesn't exist. What you actually do is flip between different tasks never fully concentrating on one or the other.  Do one thing completely then move on to the next.
20. Be ruthless with meetings. All meetings should have an agenda and an output. They should have a clear start and finish time and should only include people who 100% have to be there. Everyone should know before the meeting what will be achieved at it. Meetings aren't social activities. Keep them short.
21. Have a strategic approach to communications. Know who you need to communicate with, what about and when, and how they prefer to be communicated with. Most people need a lot less communication than we suppose. Ask them!
22. Try new things. Much poor time management actually has its roots in boredom. Add in new activities to vary your routine. You are not a robot. Mess around with your own schedule and have whole days to focus on particular things. A change is as good as a rest.
23. Measure your results. Repeat your time log every three months. You should be able to show improvement every time you do it. Note the areas that are not changing and focus on them in the following quarter.
24. Stay healthy and stress-free. Meditate, eat a healthy diet, cut down on coffee, exercise. Have hobbies you do only for pleasure.
25. Review your habits regularly. Something that may have served you well in the past may not work in the future. Regularly review everything (including your goals) and change as appropriate. Life is about change. If you are not changing, you are not living. Most commentators suggest an end of year review. 

These are the best tips for time management I could find across a range of web sites. They are all pretty straightforward and easy to do. But if it was that easy then everyone would have perfect time management but they don't. Why? What do you think? Why is following these tips so difficult?

In later posts I will examine each of these time management tips and see if I can find small changes that will make them more effective.