How do you manage your time? When you say yes to one activity and no to another you’re actually voting with your time. We have 24 hours in a day so time seems a limited commodity.  But that’s
86 400 seconds — loads of valuable time in fact. Author Tim Ferris in his book "4 Hour Work Week" guides us in the 80/20 principle towards focussing on the important things in life in a practical way.

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) helps us to look at how we think, communicate and behave and then creates models to assist us in achieving our goals.  Effective time management is one of them. I’ll briefly introduce you to the mindset of time and then share my insights into how to get the most out of yours.

Time Line Management helps us to understand "In-Time" and "Through-Time" concepts.

In the western world we tend to interact with time sequentially. We visualise the past, present and future from left to right. NLP identifies two main states of being which are a choice and not a genetic given. Being "In-Time" is when you are fully absorbed and enjoying a chosen activity. However, although passion-driven, you are usually less aware of time passing and could be side-tracked, potentially sabotaging effective time use. (E.g. we can relate to this when going on a "Google chase" from web link to web link.)

"Through-Time", on the other hand, is process-oriented, because you are able to disassociate yourself from the experience at hand and see it stretching ahead of you. Being conscious of time passing, and the interaction of events, you have the ability to plan and multi-task. A potential pitfall, however, is that you might spend too much time on planning.

Understanding Time Line management also helps us to understand when we need to engage tasks sequentially or concurrently rather than to go too slowly or land up being overwhelmed.

Multi-tasking is mostly a female attribute and, although useful, it’s been shown in Neuroscience not to be the best way to manage time. Intuition needs to be tempered by a predominantly male trait, that of structure. Understanding this allows us to dance between the two ways of perceiving time, while balancing hunches with logic and hence best leverage our time management.

Let’s see how we can be creative with time. On any given day your heart will beat 100 000 times. Take a deep breath. Adjust your body posture to an upright one.

Now consider the following:

1. What moves you?

Do some self-reflecting on what drives you. By defining and establishing your hierarchy of values you can clarify your priorities. Ask yourself: "Is this the best thing I can be doing right now? What will have the most positive effect on my long term future? What’s working and what’s not?"

Einstein noted that the problems of today were created by the thoughts of yesterday. Remind yourself regularly of why you do what you do. Avoid using negatively-phrased mental suggestions like "I must not..." Rather pitch your aspirations positively.

Article continues on page two and three: nine more top time management tips...