I am convinced that many of us under perform. I know I do, most days I am very inefficient with time. Now, many people who argue for time management claim that the point of time management is to become more efficient and more successful. That’s all very well, but I also beleive that there is no point flogging a dead horse!

What do I mean by that? Well, some days you may not be very productive, regardless of your time management skills. Time management alone doesn’t guarentee efficiency and I am fim believer that relaxation and “fun” time is just as important and work time.

What does’t make sense to me is when peopl strictly organise their day, get ahead of schedule and cram extra work in, usually from tomorrows to do list. I should know, that used to be me a few months ago. What I began to realise was, that my work day constantly expanded to fill my whole day, unless I marked out time for my work day to end and my leisure day to being.

The point of what I am trying to say is that you need to learn to confine your work day to a set number of hours, whenever possible. Obviously, this doesn’t work all the time and some days you will need to work over, but I have found, time and time again, that compacting your work day into a set few hours brings another self improvement ‘law’ into play.

The law of forced efficiency is something that I picked up from Brian Tracy and it absolutely does work. For some reason the human mind will always spread to fill the time available. By setting deadlines for task, rather than thinking, I have a whole day for this, you will complete the task much quicker and have more free time.

Except, you shouldn’t leave this time as free time, you should block out specific time – your leisure time. Once you have mastered basic time management you are at risk of becoming a work aholic and alsoof becoming inefficenct due to a lack of work boundaries. Your newly found efficiency due to time management makes you take on more and more work, and your liesure time suffers more than ever.

Only by taking your non working time seriously and planning it out in advanced can you maintain or even improve your efficiency and well being. Crazy, but true, at least in my experience.