Most of the smartphones today have powerful built-in tools to aid us in managing our time. Powerful software packages are available for computers as well. Nevertheless, efficient time management still remains one of the most difficult aspects of human activity. Moreover, efficient time management is necessary not only for business people and managers, but for everyone. Simply, time is something that you cannot buy, alter, slow down or otherwise affect (well someone may argue that if you own a jet, you can seriously save time but again there are only 24 hours per day strictly for everybody). So, the only way to use time efficiently is to adopt some simple but important methods. In this post I will provide you with 9 important rules for managing your time efficiently. In the end of this post, I am reviewing a method called the Eisenhower Method. I will expand this topic in several upcoming posts.

Managing time is difficult because efficient time management depends on many personal traits, which are not sometimes obviously connected to time management. For example, usually those people who tend to regret on past failures are very bad at managing time. So the rule #1 for efficient time management is to stop regretting past failures and start learning from your mistakes.

When doing something, have you ever had a feeling that you were losing time? Sometimes we do have to do routine things and when doing such things, this feeling of "losing time" becomes even worse. So, rule #2 is to seek something positive in whatever you are doing and thus kill the feeling of "losing your time". Of course, if you are doing a totally useless thing, then no matter how you try to kill this feeling of "losing your time", it won't help for you will be really losing your time.

In the opening of this post I have mentioned that smartphones do have built-in time management functionality. Most of the smartphones (for example Symbian or Windows Mobile based smartphones) are very easy and comfortable to use with your desktop computer and synchronising data with the desktop software (for example Microsoft Outlook) is extremely easy. So our rule #3 is to get such a device or in the worst case get a plain old paper notebook and a pen or pencil.

Rule #4 is to keep reminders all the time. This is when smartphones or other electronic PIM devices come in handy and this is one of the things where paper notebooks have an explicit disadvantage. You can attach an alert to an entry in your electronic calendar and the device will beep or otherwise remind you about the calendar entry. With the paper notebook, you must regularly check the entries. Another form of reminder is to keep small sticky notes at your home or in your office.

When I first started using computers, it was a DOS era and the Norton Commander was the killer application of that time. Of course multi tasking in DOS was out of question. You were only able to run a single application at a time. If you look at a monitor of an average computer user today, you see gazillion of open windows: Internet browser, word processing, e-mail client, music player, graphic editor and so on. Multi-tasking is concentration's number one enemy. However, achieving efficient time management requires that you stick to rule #5 and concentrate on one thing at a time.

Imagine a large corporation. Companies as large as General Motors have tens of thousands of employees. If I remember correctly, GM has over 330,000 employees. GM has more vice presidents than there are regular employees in most of the small companies in the USA. It would take a whole day of GM's CEO to just say "Hello" to all company's top managers (I am not even saying middle managers). How then executives of such large companies manage to be successful in managing the companies? They delegate responsibilities. When an owner of a very small company feels and understands and more importantly is ready to delegate responsibility to others, it's the point when the company starts real growth. So, stick to rule #6 and delegate responsibilities whenever possible.

Sometimes we get lost in routine tasks and lose focus of the "big picture" and the long-term goals. In the end, the long-term goals matter. Those goals are the reason we do or at least must be doing everything. The short-term tasks are supposed to support achieving long-term goals. Yet, many people forget the long-term goals. In order to be successful at time management, stick to rule #7 and from time to time revise your long-term goals. Beginning of a month is a good point to do so. Also, whenever there are considerable changes in the environment or significant events occur, it makes sense to revise and if necessary update the long-term goals.

Try to make realistic to-do (also called a task list) lists. All of us want to accomplish as many things as possible during a day. But keep in mind that there are only 24 hours per day, not an hour more. If you make unrealistic to-do lists, in the end you will get frustrated because every day you will have many unaccomplished things carried from the previous day. At the same time you should not fall in another extreme and make very easy to-do lists. Always keep in mind that when it comes to time management, Pareto's principle works in all its beauty: 80% of tasks can be completed in 20% of the disposable time and the remaining 20% of tasks will eat up 80% of the time. However, we can make the Pareto's law to work for us to increase productivity. Did you know that 80% of the productivity can be achieved by doing 20% of the tasks? If you want to do so, keep in mind the rule #8: make realistic and achievable to do lists and the rule #9: try to find and do those 20% of tasks that will help you achieve the 80% of productivity.

Finally, I would like to talk about a very powerful method for efficiently managing your time called the Eisenhower Method. It is believed that the US president Dwight D. Eisenhower was using this method. I'm not sure if he was the inventor but it if this method worked for Mr. Eisenhower, then it must work for you and me as well.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important - President Eisenhower would say. More formally, we can categorize tasks on two scales according to their importance and urgency. If we make a matrix as shown on an exhibit below, we get 4 quadrants.

Thus, according to this system, each task can belong to one of the 4 quadrants and thus a task can be: A. urgent and important (top-left quadrant), B. urgent but unimportant (top-right quadrant), C. not urgent but important (bottom-left quadrant) and D. not urgent and not important (bottom-right) quadrant. After you classify your tasks, the matrix shows how you must approach the tasks. As you can see from the exhibit, you must get done urgent and important tasks right away, make note and when time comes do the important but not urgent tasks, you can easily delegate urgent but not important tasks to others and finally you must try to minimize spending your time on unimportant and not urgent tasks. Yes, the tasks from the bottom-right quadrant eat up that 80% of your time. Examples? Here you are: chatting, gossiping on the phone, watching absolutely useless TV programs, clueless and useless Internet surfing, taking 2-hour showers (like our Juliet) and so on.

Time management is a topic that can easily fill a book or two and of course it is impossible to speak about all of the aspects in a single blog posts. However, I hope I have given you a good starting point. I will expand the topic in the upcoming posts and provide you with external references as well.