Managing And Tracking Your Time

Maybe the most single problem that people have today is "time poverty". Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal lives. Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they feel. This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill can cause you to fall into the reactive mode of living. Instead of clearly deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around you. Pretty soon you lose all sense of control. You feel that your life is running you, rather than you running your life.

If you accept that your time is non renewable, worthless, then it makes sense to take this most valuable personal resource seriously, and devote to it the attention it deserves. Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value. And time is absolutely essential for the important relationships in your life. The very act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to improve your individual time management immediately.

Here's some good habits we can form to eliminate time wasting:
- Understand how you use each day;
- Set Priorities;
- Plan Your Time;
- Review Your Progress;
- Take Time Out.

Top ten ideas for balancing all aspects of your life:
- Make an appointment with yourself;
- Care for your body: eat, exercise, rest;
- Cut some slack
- Blur the boundaries
- Take a break
- Take the road less traveled
- Be still
- Be a peacetime patriot
- Do what you love to do
- Focus on strategy

Here's some good software tools that can help:
- True Time Tracker - free desktop time-tracking app;
- Toggl - web-based time-tracking service;
- Free Time Tracking - opensource time-tracking tool.

When done right, time management software tools can provide significant services. They make life easier for people and people alike by allowing for Web based access and record keeping.

By: Monica Anniston

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Monica Anniston - author of a series of articles and reviews related to time-tracking, developer of Time Tracker for Windows).