Why is Time Management Important?
8 good reasons!
Why is Time Management Important?
8 good reasons!
Take a minute to ask yourself: why is time management important?
Too often we use our time as if we have an almost limitless supply. This page provides a timely reminder that time is both scarce and valuable. Peter Drucker captured the importance of time management well:
Time is the scarcest resource; and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.
This is one of our Manage in a Minute pages. These contain essential tips on fundamental management topics. No fuss or side-tracks, they get straight to the point. Here, in a series of bullet points which can be read in a minute (ish!), are some essential tips on why time management is important.
Why is time management important: because it’s scarce
Think about it for a moment: if you don’t manage time nothing gets managed! Yet too often we act as if time is not scarce at all. As a result we don’t really pay much attention to how we manage it. So here are some timely reminders about why we need to guard our time, building on Drucker’s pertinent observation:
- You can’t buy time. In the sense that time is distributed equally to all, each of us gets 24 hours a day.
- You can’t stop time. It marches on, you can’t hold up time, to take a bit longer.
- You can’t save time. It can’t be saved for future use, at another time when you might feel you need it more.
But you can live it. Eleanor Roosevelt is reputed to have once said:
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift; that’s why they call it the present.
Why is time management important: because it’s valuable
To live well we should make the most of our time. This leads directly to our second point: our time is valuable. As M. Scott Peck expressed it:
“Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”
Your time is valuable because you are valuable, your ideas are valuable, and your plans are valuable. When we value time our attention then turns towards freeing time to do more of what we value, time to focus on results and worthwhile work. Why is time management important? It frees you to do more of what you want to do. It’s therefore worthwhile asking:
- What value do you place on your time?
- How can you free time up to do more valuable things with it?
- How might you use some of that freed up time?
Why Is Time Management Important – 8 Good Reasons.
We’ve adapted 8 points about time from the anonymous poem: Take Time. Time, according to the old English (or Irish) verse:
- … is the price of success.
- … is the source of strength.
- … is the secret of youth.
- … is the seed of wisdom.
- … brings happiness.
- … will carry you to the stars.
- … is the joy of life.
- … is the music of the soul.
If this it true, and it’s difficult to argue otherwise, then it’s clear why time needs to be carefully managed. Especially if when we remember how scarce and valuable it is. Read through each of these 8 points and reflect on how you manage your time.
Managing time and priority
If you want some practical tips and tools, go to our guide Managing Time and Priority. The guide expands on the tips in this article and includes some excellent tools to help you eradicate time wasters. It will help you to:
Assess your time priorities and manage your actions.- Develop coping strategies to avoid the limitations of “busyness”.
- Manage the impact of other people’s demands on your time.
- Develop approaches to “getting things done”.
- Apply practical tools to managing priorities and time, to get the right things done.
- Help others to manage their time.
Tools:
Tool 1: Commitments summary
Tool 2: Time log
Tool 3:Time analysis
Tool 4: Time planning with task filters
Tool 5: Task priorities
