Did you know that there are only 168 hours in the week? That is not a very long time at all if you think about it. A large majority of us do not get done want we would like and end up putting off until tomorrow what could be done today. That is where effective time management comes in.

Here are five tips that can help you use your time in much more effective fashion:

1. Schedule your day for everything you need to get done. Make time for work and time for play, and put it on your schedule. Follow your schedule religiously, and stick to it. Your schedule should list your priorities in the order you need to get them done. If you want to spend some time at the gym, make sure you put it on your schedule and make it a routine.

2. Before you go to bed every night, list what you are going to do the next day, starting with first thing in the morning. You can also do this right after you get up and before you start your day, but regardless, have a to do list that you follow every day and then stick with it. When you’ve got one task completed, mark it off and move down to the next thing. Keep going until you get to the very last task you need to complete. If you follow this method, you’ll rarely get behind.

3. DON’T make television, your cell phone, social websites, etc., part of your day. In other words, these things should not go on your schedule. If you get everything else done and want to play a little bit, then you can do some surfing or watch a little television. However, wait until you’ve gotten everything else complete to do this.

4. Get the “have to” things off your list first, and then put the ones that can wait until another day after those. Nobody’s superhuman, after all, and there are going to be times when you can’t get everything done on your list. Staying realistic about what you can and can’t do on a particular day is going to give you great peace of mind as well as make you more efficient.

5. Mix harder with easier tasks to keep from getting overwhelmed. If you wish, interchanging hard tasks for easy tasks and vice versa throughout the day can help keep you from getting burned out. If you have several big or difficult jobs in a row, see if you can spread them out over the course of a week. You can also make a to-do list for the entire week so that you can spread out the harder jobs on different days, including picking specific days for specific projects.

As you may have noticed, it is all about planning ahead. It is always beneficial for us to think about what complications might occur within our schedule, so just be prepared to take a detour when necessary. Other than that, planning ahead is the best way to keep your schedule intact, and your time productive.

Whilst her introduction meant I had to work a bit harder at the outset to engage my audience, I could hardly be critical of her as I had the same reaction (albeit internally) when initially asked to speak on it.  How was I going to make this topic interesting and engaging?

I have repeatedly found there is always a way of presenting something old and traditional in a new and innovative way. Being set the challenge on the topic of ‘file management’, I was not going to let myself or my audience down.

I decided to discuss file management in the context of effective time management.  After all, my audience members by the very nature of their work definitely could benefit from improvements in this area.  As we are all well aware, the time available to us in each week is finite – there are only 168 hours.  Within that 168 hours we will eat, drink, sleep as well as work.  So in order to maximise the amount of time available to do the things we love we need to be highly efficient and effective in the use of our time.

Having spent some time immersed in the topic of effective time management, I started to reflect on the tools I use in my business to improve my time management and hence the main focus of my posting today.

As mentioned above my experience has been there are always new and innovative ways to approach the ‘old’.  Some clever software developers have done exactly this with the concept of reading.

I want to share with you some software I was made aware of which has allowed me to dramatically improve my time management.  If like me you spend a lot of time on your computer reading documents, then you must look into the software package known as Rapid Reader.  Now I am no techy so please don’t ask me to explain the mechanics of this system.  However what I do know is after installing the program (which was easy) I went from reading approximately 150 words per minute on the screen to 750 words a minute after using the package for only 15 minutes.  Incredible gains and TRUE!

This process has to be experienced to be believed.  Even better you can use it for email, word documents and PDFs!   As well as the speed gains, your eyes are going to love you for it – how often have you gone home from a hard day on the computer at work and felt like your eyes were going to burn out of their sockets?

If you are serious about increasing your productivity (and want to give your eyes some down time), particularly if you work in an environment where you are reading large volumes of documentation on screen then you must give this software try.  It horrifies me to think how much time I wasted in the past before I had access to this tool.

So what have you got to lose?  Once you’ve started using it like me you will be able to use the extra time to focus on more valuable work activities or even create some time off.  Thank goodness for innovative approaches to old ways of doing things.

Click here to access the software.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.