Did you ever look back at your day and wonder how it got away from you; that you didn't get as much done as you'd thought you should have? As you build your successful career or that business of your own, your personal time is likely your most precious asset. Your income will be in direct proportion to how you spend your time. One cannot buy more time, the clock is always running. I have to love those folks that continually offer the excuse "I didn't have enough time". Guess what? We all have the same amount of time each day. 24 hours; no more no less. It's about what you do with your time that matters.

Here are some simple tips that will help you get more out of your time, make you more productive and efficient and put you on the road to greater wealth.

Keep a detailed time log

The first step to better managing your time is to find out how you're currently spending it. Keeping a time log is an effective way to do this. After trying it for just one day, you'll immediately gain tremendous insight into where your time is actually going. The very act of measuring something is often enough to raise your unconscious habits into real habits where you then have a chance to scrutinize and change them.

Here's how to do it. Throughout your day record the time whenever you start or stop any activity. Consider using a stopwatch to just record time intervals for each activity. You can do this during your working time or throughout your entire day. At the end of the day, sort all the time chunks into general categories, and find out what percentage of your time is being spent on each type of activity. If you want to be thorough, do this for a week, and calculate the percentage of your total time that you spent on each activity. Be as detailed as possible. Note how much time you spend on email, reading newsgroups, web surfing, phone calls, eating, going to the bathroom, etc. If you get up out of your chair, it probably means you need to make an entry in your time log. You should typically end up with 50-100 log entries per day.

You may be surprised to discover you're spending only a small fraction of your designated "working time" doing actual work. Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1-2 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, shuffling papers, and doing lots of other non-work related tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn't even start doing real work until 11:00am and begins to wind down about 3:30pm.

Analyze your results

When first keeping a time log, most folks only finish 15 hours worth of real work in a week while spending 40 - 50 hours designated as working time. Even though this is technically about twice as productive as the average office worker, the results are still disturbing. What happened to the other 25 - 35 hours? The time log will expose the "lost time" for you, showing all the time drains you weren't consciously aware of like checking email too often, excessive perfectionism, doing tasks that didn't need to be done, over-reading the news, taking too much time for meals, failing to avoid preventable interruptions, etc.

Calculate your personal efficiency ratio.

When you discover that you've spent 40 hours at the office but only completed 15 hours of actual work within that time, you'll start asking yourself some interesting questions. Your income and your sense of accomplishment depends on those 15 hours, not on the total amount of time you spend at the office. So deciding to begin recording your daily efficiency ratio as the amount of time you spend on actual work divided by the total amount of time you spend in the office is critical. While it certainly might bother you to learn that you were only working 25% of the time initially, it will most likely be extremely foolish to simply work longer hours.

Efficiency Ratio = (Time Doing "Real Work") / (Time Spent "At Work")

Cut back on total hours to force an increase in efficiency.

If you've ever tried to discipline yourself to do something you weren't really motivated to do, you most likely failed. That is the natural result you will experienced when you try to push yourself to work harder. In fact, trying harder actually de-motivates most people and will drive your efficiency ratio even lower. Take the opposite approach. Tomorrow, allow yourself to put in five hours total at the office, and don't work at all the rest of the day. You'll likely find something interesting happening. Your brain will get the idea that working time is a scarce commodity because you'll work almost the entire five hours straight and get an efficiency ratio of over 90%. Continue this experiment for the rest of the week and you will probably end up getting about 25 hours of work done with only 30 hours total spent in the office, for an efficiency ratio of over 80%. The results - you were able to reduce your weekly working time by 30 hours while gaining 10 more hours of real work done. Once your brain figures out that working time is scarce, you suddenly become a lot more efficient simply because you have to be. When time constraints are tight, you will usually find a way to get your work done. It's too easy to be inefficient when you have all the time in the world.

Gradually increase total hours while maintaining peak efficiency.

Over a period of a few weeks, you should be able to maintain an efficiency ratio above 80% while gradually increasing your total weekly office time. I've been able to maintain this level for several years now, and I commonly get about 40 hours of real work done every week, while only spending about 45 total hours of actual "working time". I've learned the ideal approach for my personal productivity. I find that the more time I put in, the faster my productivity drops off. The important thing is that the system allowed me to optimize my effectiveness while working but also created a tremendous amount of balance in my life. Even though using this approach tripled my business productivity, I still gained plenty of time to pursue non-work activities.

Time logging is the best choice to ensure optimal personal productivity without increasing your hours. However, time logging only needs be done periodically to provide these benefits. I do it for a week every 3-6 months or so and over the years it's made a big difference in my life. If I go too many months without time logging, my productivity gradually drops as I fall back into unconscious time-wasting habits. You'll probably find as I do that your gut feelings about your productivity are closely related to how much real work you actually get done. When you feel your productivity is lower than you'd like, raise your awareness by time logging, measure your efficiency ratio, and then optimize your efficiency to boost your productivity back up where it belongs. Time logging takes very little time and effort to implement, but the long-term payoff can be life changing.

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