Good news: two months to go. Bad news: only two months to get everything done.
Time management, a concept preached about by work managers, coaches and your emotional aunts during your high school graduation party, has grown into a big money business with lots of products like trendy planners, blogs and books written to turn your “struggle time” into “clobbering time.”
Time management isn’t just about watching deadlines; it’s about planning goals and breaking each goal down into smaller achievable steps.
Here’s a quick look into two books designed to help people achieve every goal they desire by helping the reader become architects of their own effectiveness.
“Manage Your Time” by Tim Hindle
“Manage Your Time” offers many tips for achieving time management. In his book, he recommends you begin all goal achievements by assessing your time.
You’ll really get a good chance of prioritizing your weekly time by doing some math, for example – take the hours you are in class, add them to your work hours, sleep hours and workout hours and subtract those from 168; that’s your free time.
Hindle offers great advice into utilizing the free time that you have with his 72-page illustrated book, which is surprisingly not very quick to read, as he is a mojo for utilizing time.
The author also provides tips for making business meetings and phone calls go faster and he also discusses how a clean work area can increase your personal productivity.
“The Magic Lamp” by Keith Ellis
If you wanted to read a book about just wishing everything you wanted to achieve and have the goals come through from magic; I wouldn’t recommend this book.
Keith Ellis uses cute word play into differentiating goal setting from having wishes just come through by positive thinking. At the end of the day, the entire book is really just a book about goal setting, but with the words lazy people love to hear.
His concept consists of four steps: 1. Lock On (to your goal) 2. Act 3. Manage Process 4. Persist.
After reading this, you will quickly be reminded of “Family Guy” when Brian Griffin, family dog and abysmal author coined “Want It, Wish It, Do It.”
Despite the shady marketing of the author’s concept, “The Magic Lamp” does indeed provide great goal setting tips like making progress reports and knowing that there’s multiple solutions to every problem.
One concept not discussed in either book is that each student of the EMU Community is on the same struggle bus to achievement together.
Perhaps if we are all positive and helpful to each other, maybe all of us can reach the stop to success.
