Get the Most from Your Time by Training Yourself

When it comes to trying to manage our time, we usually put a focus on putting more effort into the job. We really think that work has to equal hard work. Then comes the realization that although we’re working hard, we don’t seem to be moving forward at a particularly fast pace—if at all…

This is because we often look at a job as having a certain level of difficulty which is set in stone. No matter how hard we try, certain jobs take a certain amount of time and that’s it.

Is there a way around this problem?

There is, and it isn’t to work harder. What is needed it to make a distinction between the effort we expend on completing a task and the quality of the work we produce. Concentrating only on the effort we expend leads us to be concerned with how hard we work and not how well we work. Working with this view of reality leads us to look at the results at the end of the project and then (usually) being disappointed at those results. We also usually wonder why the time seemed to be nowhere near enough to do the job properly.

We all suffer from this type of thinking at some time or other—and it’s seen at it’s most obvious in the workaholic, the person for whom the most important thing is to be moving rather than producing great results. In this case the effort is mainly used to stay still, a little like treading water—lots of effort but no progress.

What we have to do is stop thinking about the amount of time we spend on something, and begin to look at how efficiently we do it. One of the best ways of doing this is to undergo training in order to improve our performance. We have to stop thinking about hard work and look more at easy work.

The difficulty is that when we find ourselves up your neck in work it can be difficult to stop and to spend some time to look at how we do things. However, taking time to train ourselves will pay off big time a little bit further down the line. The reason we don’t do it is that we have to keep moving forward in order to get the job done – or least that’s what we think. The trouble is that we’re moving forward but not getting things done effectively.

If you find yourself struggling what you need to do is think about how the job could be done more easily, and a good way to do this is to simply look at how other people do it and take their ideas. It’s a fact that almost any job has already been done by someone else, and they discovered the solution, and all that you really need to do is copy the way that they did it and do it that way yourself. It’s amazing how something so simple as copying someone else’s idea can shave hours of the time it takes you to complete a task

Take something as simple as driving a car, for instance. When we first learn to drive we aren’t very good at it, so that means it takes a long time to get from A to B.. But if we undergo a period of training with a driving instructor we’ll eventually become better at driving and getting from A to B. becomes a much simpler and easier task. In short, we learn to do the task quicker. Once we’ve undergone training, we find that the job is a lot quicker to do. The same thing can be applied to almost anything in your life. Do some training in whatever did you find difficult and you find the time taken to do it will shorten amazingly.

The good thing about training yourself to do things better is that it can save a lot of time when taken over the long term. Even if you saved just one hour day you can even be easily saving 25 hours a month. Training yourself to do things better is an amazingly simple and effective time management technique. Today, take a look at something which takes a long time to do, and ask yourself a simple question such as: could I do this quicker if I was better trained? The answer is invariably yes. Then undertake training, and you’ll be amazed at how much less time you need to complete that once difficult task.