Time Management: Personal Satisfaction And A Sense Of

Purpose In Life

Time Management is the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount
of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, or productivity.
Time management is the discipline of controlling your life through your use of the 168 hours that are
available to you weekly. In mastering time management, you’ll be able to balance the demands on
your time and achieve your goals. This will then help you to avoid stress and increase your level of
productivity. As it relates to managing your time effectively from a personal perspective there are two
questions that could be considered.

The first one is: Where am I now? For this question, consideration has to be made about how one
balances work and home, and also their level of self-organization. In order to understand how to
balance the duties of the household and that of work or school, one would have to analyze how they
delegate the time between the two. For example, scheduling a time to complete household chores in
addition to completing them in a time-efficient manner. This means if you have to wash the dishes,
sweep out the house and prepare a meal, you’d have to first wash the dishes, then start pre-prepping
the meal, sweep out the house, and then finish preparing the meal. This would make executing the
task more organized and hence more efficient. Self-organization is the ability to work in an orderly and
systematic manner while being efficient and industrious. Good self-organizational skills help us to
cope with the world around us and are crucial if we want to achieve personal goals as well as perform
well in our job. Good self-organization requires the ability to prioritize, plan, manage time and work to
meet deadlines. This can be illustrated in cases where one has to choose between attending a social
event and completing an urgent assignment. They can choose to complete the assignment first, then
go to the event, or choose between doing the assignment only or only attending the social event. In
some cases, one task would have to suffer for the other despite the fact that both can be done.
However, prioritization would have to be at the forefront of making those decisions, which essentially
is getting the most important task accomplished.

The second question is: Where do I want to be in life? For this question, thoughts have to be put in
process of where does one wants to be in life and then followed by setting it as a goal. An example of
a question one would ask their-self is: What social class do I want to be in at the age of 40? They
could either be in one of the five: Upper, Upper-middle, Middle, Working, or Lower Class. Say the
person decides that they want to be in the Upper Social Class when they are at the age of 40, they
would then have to analyze that goal using the S.M.A.R.T method. What is the meaning of S.M.A.R.T?
The S.M.A.R.T method involves picking a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goal.
For example, the person realizes that the goal of being in the Upper Social Class by the age of 40 is
Specific, Measurable, and Relevant but isn’t Attainable nor Timely due to uncontrollable
circumstances, they would then have to set a more Attainable and Timely goal like, ‘Being in the
Middle Class by the age of 40’. Setting that goal now would provide direction and a destination, allow
for a clearer focus on what is important, give clarity in Decision Making, allow for more control of their
future, provide Motivation, give a sense of personal satisfaction and also give a sense of purpose in
life.