Time management is viewed by some people as rules that incorporate such things as scheduling appointments, goal setting, thorough planning, creating things to do lists and prioritizing. These are time management core basics that must be understood in order to develop effective personal time management skills. You can further fine tune these basic skills to include the finer points of each skill. This can give you that extra edge to attain the results you are looking for.

There is more skill involved in managing your time than just the core basics. Decision making, emotional intelligence and critical thinking also are important skills essential to personal growth.

Your personal time management involves everything that you do. No matter how large or how small, everything plays a part. Knowledge that you acquire, advice that you consider and each new skill are all things that must be taken into account.

If you have good time management the end result should be having a more balanced life-style. Unfortunately many people who engage in time management practices fail to grasp this concept.

Getting results is what time management is about. It is not about appearing to be busy.

Personal time management has six areas that should be improved upon with proper practice. These are physical, intellectual, social, career, emotional and spiritual.

Having a healthy body, less stress and less fatigue are all parts of the physical characteristic of good time management.

Mental growth activities, such as learning are all a part of the intellectual aspect.

Being an active member of society and developing personal or intimate relations are what the social aspect of time management is all about.

Of course school and work are part of the career aspect.

Manifesting appropriate feelings and desires is the core aspect of another quality of time management.

A personal quest for meaning looked for in religion and spiritual practices is the spiritual aspect of time management.

Thorough planning and having a set things to do list might not seem practical for each each area of your life. However, determining the areas in your life that are not being given enough attention is a vital part of time management. Since all of the aspects mentioned in this article create the whole you, if you are ignoring any of them then you are ignoring an important part of yourself.

Personal time management is a very sensible and reasonable approach to solving large and small problems. It should not be a overwhelming task.

You can easily improve your personal life and time management abilities by following several basic activities.

As one of these you should review your immediate and long-term goals often.

Have a list that is always easily accessible to you.

You should always determine which task is necessary or not necessary in achieving your goals. Which activities help you to maintain a balanced life style?

We all have times when we are at our peak and a time at which we slow down. These happen to be our natural cycles. We must be ready to do the most difficult of tasks when we are at our peak.

Learning to say say “No,” to family and friends is important and you may often see such advice being given.

When you have effective time management results it is important to reward yourself in some way.

You should encourage the people who are benefiting or who are going to benefit from your time management efforts for their cooperation.

Attend to necessary things immediately. Don’t procrastinate!!!

Be realistic in your approach to achieving your goals, while having a positive attitude. Set yourself up for success.

Keep a journal or other record of your activities in order to help get things in proper perspective.

To become a well rounded individual these are the few steps that you must initially take.

Personal time management is all about the art and science of building a better life.

You open several options to provide a broad spectrum of solutions to personal growth when you integrate time management skills into your life. It create more opportunities for you when you do so.

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Self- improvement/personal development guru Tony Robbins offers quite a bit of free training and information as well as his paid products.

Go to http://www.vladimirchen.com/get-a-free-online-seminar-with-anthony-robbins/1320/ and listen to a free online seminar by Tony and get the free PDF workbook to go along with it.

Then of course go to Tony’s own blog at http://training.tonyrobbins.com/ to find some great videos and more.

And don’t miss Tony’s new NBC show Breakthough with Tony. Here is what one website said about: NBC has ordered a new life-changing series starring Tony Robbins whose worldwide work as a peak performance strategist is renowned. The series will feature Robbins guiding participants through complex challenges and personal obstacles, while changing their lives and redesigning their futures.

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Here are some tips to help overcome being a workaholic:

EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP! Make it a point to get at least eight hours of sleep and plenty of rest. While food has substitutes in the form of natural medicines or artificial foods, there are no substitutes for sleep and rest. Don’t believe that you can always “catch some sleep or rest later.” Your body cannot make up for lost sleep or rest time because it is not physiologically possible. I used to work the overnight shift and sometimes didn’t sleep well the next day. Sometimes it wouldn’t affect me the next night however it would always play turmoil the next night even after sleeping much of the day.

STRICTLY FAMILY ON WEEKENDS! Resolve to make Saturdays and Sundays strictly for family time. If you are single and don’t have a family locally make plans to spend this time with close friends. And stick to this

MAKE SURE THAT YOU EAT! Proper nutrition is essential to avoid BURNOUT. Make sure you get food in your stomach. Workaholics are known to be food-skippers. If you can’t afford to get off your desk or from doing paperwork, have food delivered to you. It’s always a good to have sugar free or sugar low snacks in your desk drawer to use when you need a quick pick me up.

CONFINE WORK to your office. Don’t bring your work home (unless you work at home and then you can’t avoid this). Keep those files in your office desk where they belong. If you work from home, keep your work in the confines of your home office. Keep them there until the next day when you start work. Work only within your working hours and environment. Set a working schedule and STICK TO IT!!!

EXERCISE! You must plan the time to exercise. You body needs to be conditioned, and working non-stop unless you have a very physical job isn’t the answer. Since most workaholics tend to have their behinds stuck on their chairs, it’s even more important that you get some exercise.

PLAN YOUR DAY AND YOUR WORK. Work on only one or two things at a time. Write down the projects that need to be worked on immediately or are urgent, keeping the least ones at the bottom of your list. After you’ve done this, be guided by this list. Turning this activity into a habit will also help you manage your time better, be more organized, and accomplish more.

WORK TO LIVE! Always keep in mind that you work so you can live and have a comfortable life. Always remember that you don’t live to work. Working is just one of the many useful and fruitful activities you do that enables you to live a good life and give your family (or any of your dependents) their needs. Don’t make work your life.

If after trying to follow the suggestions given here in this article you still find yourself prone to be obsessive compulsive about your work then maybe it is time to look for help from outside sources. Possibly your city has a Workaholics Anonymous organization. Much like Alcoholics Anonymous they utilize a 12 Step Recovery Program to help deal with the obsessive-compulsive tendencies of the work-a-holic.

I don’t know about you but I for one enjoy relaxing, so now that I’m finished working on this article, please excuse me while I live a little!!!

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This is from an article that I wrote several years ago and that I am now dividing into two parts. The first part is about the symptoms associated with people who are referred to as workaholics.

Excuse my digression from my regular writing of marketing articles and let me apply my psychology degree to a matter at hand that many people tend to forget. . That is that we were not meant to work all of our waking hours. Please excuse the length of the article, as there is much to be said about the subject matter.

Back in the late 1960’s the rock group The Byrds came out with a song called Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season). It’s lyrics came at a time when the world was undergoing the turmoil of the Vietnam War and reminded people that what was going on at the time was just a part of the evolution of time passing by and that the war to would pass in its time. The lyrics of the song are based on the Bible Verse taken from Ecclesiastes 3:1-9: The words taken from the Bible in one translation are as follows:

1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. 9 What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?

Do any of the following situations remind you of yourself?

1 Lately, your job has taken up much of your time.

2 You’ve even started bringing work at home and you keep working until the wee hours of the morning.

3 You spend Saturdays and Sundays with your head bent on your work.

4 And you’re supposed to spend these days with your family, or friends, or for your relaxation!

5 No longer do you work in order to live, but you now live in order to work.

6 Work is now the center of your daily life, while the more important things have been relegated to the trunk of your car; or in the backseat, if things are still not that worse.

7 The only time you don’t think of work is during the three or four hours a day that you spend sleeping.

8 You devote 16 hours of your day each day to working furiously: making money, reaching goals, working on giving your families the best, planning and mobilizing yourself for success.

If you have a combination of more than three of these situations occurring in your life it is most likely that you’ve become a workaholic.

Yes, there is a time to work, but there must also be a balance. There must be a time to relax. What can cause another wise seemingly sane person to become a work-a-holic? It is like alcoholism a disease in many ways.

If someone’s home life is unhappy they might rather than spend time going to a bar after work hours instead spend time after regular work hours doing more than necessary just to avoid going home for the evening. They may take work home with them and seclude themselves from their spouse or other family members with the excuse that the work has to be finished. This can become a pattern, since it is a way of avoiding situations that are not easily dealt with by the “work-a-holic”. Money problems, can lead to a person becoming obsessed with working. Once it starts, the work-a-holic personality feels as if they must continue to work or things will not get finished. The work-a-holic likes to shoulder the weight of the world. But this can lead to stress.

It is different things to different people. To a mountaineer it is the challenge of pushing physical resources to the limit by striving to achieve a demanding goal. To the homeward bound motorist it can be the hassles of heavy traffic and obnoxious exhaust fumes. To the student it can be exam pressure.

Take a piece of paper and write the word stress at the top. Now write down all the words and images that come to your mind as you think about this word.

Most people respond to the word stress in negative ways. They see it as a destructive, debilitating force.

Negative stress is DISTRESS. It is the stress of losing, failing, overworking and not coping. Distress affects people in a negative often, harmful manner. We all experience distress from time to time. It is a normal, unavoidable part of living.

To often those who become the obsessed workaholic go on and on until they experience the defeat at the end of the road often known as BURNOUT

Too much stress leads to burnout, a condition called BURNOUT, which is characterized by emotional and physical exhaustion.

The main symptoms associated with burnout are:

Chronic fatigue.

Anger at those making demands on you.

Self-criticism for putting up with the demands.

Cynicism, negativism and irritability.

A sense of being besieged.

Hair-trigger display of emotions.

A combination of all of these symptoms indicates that stress of working more than you should is wearing you down and that it is now time to take strong stand to do something about it.

Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day is an expression used a lot as an excuse of not getting a project finished. “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day”, has been used as an excuse by people who don’t complete their tasks. It has also used by those trying to console those who have not finished a task or are trying to hard to complete a project in a certain amount of time.

If you are of the Christian faith then you hopefully subscribe to the creation story of God creating the Universe and the earth in 6 days. In Genesis 2:1-3 it is written “1: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2: And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done. 3: So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.”

We are not as mighty as God and yet according to this Biblical text even God rested after working. Who are we to put ourselves above God and not take a break from our work? We don’t want to work ourselves into the condition of “burnout” so what can we do to overcome the obsessive-compulsive habits of workaholism?

Part 2 of this article will explore ways in which you can relax and enjoy life more. Although work is important there is much more to life than work.

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What is perserverance? It can be defined best by some of the traits associated with it.  Perseverance is commitment, hard work, patience, endurance. Perseverance is being able to bear difficulties calmly and without complaint.  Perseverance is trying again and again.

Today I have a link to share with you a little movie about perserverance called The “Persevere” Movie. It’s only a few minutes long but it is truly motivational. Please take the time to watch it.

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Tools to Life is going to show you how to create the changes that we all want in our lives through the use of a one-of-a-kind guided self development course. If you think you’d like to take part in this experience and in turn start changing your own life, join today at http://toolstolife.com.

Once you are there search for me Keith Stieneke and join me as a friend.
Thanks in advance.

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Acting interested in other people and what they have to say may or may not be a social skill in itself, but it is important step in a variety of other social skills. If you are truly listening to what someone has to say then you must convey this by acting interested.

Dale Carnegie lists as number one  in his “Six steps to Make People Like You”  that you must “Become genuinely interested in other people.” If you become more interested in people then you’ll naturally become a better listener. Carnegie also relates that you must also do the following:
2 Smile.
3 Remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4 Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5 Talk in the terms of the other person’s interest.
6 Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

It becomes easier find out what someone is really passionate about and to dispel negative assumptions that can mess up the communication when you are truly interested in what another person has to say. By listening you may find many similarities between one another and also learn to appreciate the differences.

When you operate as a good listener you will be a positive and pleasant exception among the others who are only waiting for their turn to talk again.

Pay attention to others and you will make them feel good because of the attention, and validating them and their interests. That is how connections are made.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. ~ G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)

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What is the difference between a closed-ended question and an open-ended question?

A closed-ended question is a form of question which can normally be answered using a simple “yes” or “no”, a specific simple piece of information, or a selection from multiple choices.

An open-ended question, cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”, or with a specific piece of information, and which give the person answering the question scope to give the information that seems to them to be appropriate. Open-ended questions are sometimes phrased as a statement which requires a response.

Although closed-ended questions allow for memory recall, they are not effective in solving major problems, or in achieving goals. Open-ended questions beg to be solved and don’t have definite answers. In order for each person the answer may be different, yet appropriate for that purpose.

One thing is certain and that is if you think about something the same way for a long time, and ask and the questions about it in the same way, it will lead you to the same behaviors every time. If these behaviors are unproductive or destructive it is time to change them.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

So what do you do to get out of this circular pattern of unproductive, self-destructive thinking? The answer is to of course ask better questions, which includes asking a variety of different questions.

Benjamin Bloom is known for developing the taxonomy of higher level thinking questions. Although this formula is developed for educators you may also use it to develop questions to improve your thinking process and increase your options. The steps of this taxonomy are as follows: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. For more about this process check out the following URL: http://specialed.about.com/od/teacherchecklists/a/bloom.htm and get started on using the technique today.

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According to Henrik Edberg at http://www.positivityblog.com there are at a minimum at least eight basic tips on social skills that have been used successfully over and over throughout thousands of years.

One of the most basic social skills or component of social skills is to listen to another person or persons.

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them. ~ Ralph Nichols

Because people are often centered upon themselves and this being a part of human nature listening is probably one of the least appreciated social skills. Unfortunately most people are just used to talking about themselves or waiting for the other person to finish so they can start talking again. I have noticed that a majority of people, myself included, fall into this category.

Listening is about much more than hearing the words that come out of another person’s mouth. It is about showing interest in what the other person is saying and taking the time to understand what is being said. Rajesh Setty, who is a friend and business associate of mine, mentions that active listening is often overlooked for several reasons such as ego, lack of knowledge, not being able to handle silence, amongst other reasons. Because of this people focus on talking rather than listening.

Henrik states to get past this he has found that it is important to just forget about yourself and focus your attention outward during a conversation rather than inward. In other words place the mental focus on the person you are talking and listening to instead of on yourself. This makes you less self-centered and your need to be in the spotlight diminishes.

When you actually listen to what people are saying it also becomes easier to find potential paths in the conversation. By asking what are known as open-ended questions – those that will give you more than a yes or no answer, you can explore these paths and have more interesting conversations.

You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.— M. Scott Peck

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