When most people think about time management, they think about mental discipline, following processes and other hard core “will power” techniques to stop procrastination and get more things done in less time.

Sure all of those things can and do work, but at what cost? Wouldn’t it be more fun to learn other ways of improving your time management that cost very little in terms of time and mental discipline? Let’s skip those “Brute Force Time Management” techniques and instead try something easier.

Buckminster Fuller (or “Bucky Fuller” as he was called by his friends) is reported to have said “Environment is stronger than will power”. Sounds smart, doesn’t it? Consider this. If you’re out of shape and want to improve your health, how hard would that be to do if you’re locked in room full of delicious sugar cookies. On the flip side, how easy would that be to do if you lived inside of a fitness center? Pretty easy don’t you think?

Most people don’t even stop to think about their environment as they go about trying to improve their time management skills. I think the idea of creating an environment to support your productivity and time management success is something to consider. Try something here for a minute and see what you think.

Take a look around your work space. Pick out 5 easy to indentify objects in it and ask yourself “Does this support my goal to be better at time management or detract from my goal to be better at time management?”

For each item, if it doesn’t support your goal for better time management, get rid of it or otherwise handle it appropriately.

Most people have at least one element they should toss. Oddly enough, when doing this exercise, people suddenly see their television as a major distraction. Something that not only slows their productivity, but which also can completely destroy your ability to accomplish your daily goals. If you have a television in your work space, unplug it and move it out of the room.

A messy desk full of papers can be another distraction from your productivity and efforts for better time management. Just ask yourself the simple question of whether having a messy desk supports your productivity or detracts from it. Beyond aesthetics, a messy desk makes it harder to find your important papers and can cost you more time as you have to hunt to find them. Help yourself out, clean up your desk!

I used 2 simple examples here because they help make the point clearly. Getting rid of anything in your work space that does not support your productivity and time management goals is critical to your success.

If we were to take this one step further, the next step would be to improve your environment by actually adding things which add to and make it easier for you to accomplish your time management efforts. We’ll share hints on how to do this in other articles.

Tags: Self Improvement

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