Improve Your Time Management Skill Through Mental Self Help

A few years ago, a friend invited me to take a seminar that offered to help "improve your time management skill". It was a two day affair that cost quite a bit of money. It focused on ways to stop procrastination by using a special time planner product. The seminar was informative and the product was certainly complete, but the whole thing missed an important ingredient to stop procrastination -- managing the mental aspects of working on a project that might cause procrastination to get in the way of any time management. This article will discuss how to improve your time management skill with the aid of stop procrastination mental self help programs.

Time management skill is pretty simple in concept. You know how much time you have, what you need to do and when, and using anything from a calendar to a complex time management planner, you mark out, or budget, your time. It's self imposed efficiency -- personal accounting.

We all need time management skills. In today's busy world, we often feel we have more to do that we have time to do it. Employers, in seeking to get the maximum return from employees, tend to demand they multi-task, giving them the burden of many projects. Balancing family and work life becomes an increasing problem, and we wind up with many tasks we would rather avoid than face. This generates a tendency for procrastination.

To get around the problem, many time management skill experts recommend using planners, of which there are many kinds. The idea is that you can't procrastinate on a project if you are constantly reminded of its due date. And if you can break it down to small, manageable pieces, you can "knock it out" and get it done, one bit at a time.

Of course, what has to be included is the time to manage the time management system you have chosen! So now you have the problem of time management, and managing to find the time to – manage your time! It's a round-robin!

So while a time management skill building system can help you get organized, it takes its own kind of work, adding to your time burden. And "burden" is the key word here. If what you do to improve your time management skill becomes a burden, it opens the door to the thing it is supposed to solve -- procrastination. Moreover, seeing the layout of the steps of a project (which you may dread doing in the first place) can be daunting, causing you to procrastinate, rather than work on it.

Another issue is the type of project. If your project is artistic, or requires inspiration, anything you do to improve your time magament skill won't be of much help. Creativity is very much based on intuition, timing, and inspiration. It can't be scheduled -- any more than you can decide to fall in love. Like so many human emotional and inspirational projects, it depends on the human spirit, not a schedule.

Given that your task or project is something more mundane, improving your time management skill can help schedule it. But, there is a second component, your attitude about the project or task, how you feel. We have feelings about what we are doing, or have to do. These need to be addressed as well.

We all have projects that we dread. When that happens, we naturally avoid them. Children do this with homework all the time! It might be argued that in school, we learn procrastination.

The fact of life is that we all have things to do that we don't want to do. No one likes to pay bills, but we have an obligation to do so. No one likes to meet with a difficult client, but the client pays the bills. No one wants to make cold sales calls, but without them, we can't gather clients and customers.

When you improve your time management skill you know WHEN to do things to manage these projects, but the skill can't make you FEEL better about doing them. For that, you need an added boost, a mental self help program that changes your inner thinking about projects or tasks that your would avoid or even dread.

We need to change our inner thinking from seeing the intimidating aspects of the project or task, to focusing on the benefit of what happens when we get it done. This cannot be forced consciously. It requires addressing the emotions, which are the province of the unconscious mind. Self hypnosis programs can do this, as well as effective subliminal message programs that send positive affirmations about projects and task accomplishment directly to the unconscious mind.

One such mental self help program is Get It Done DSPP, a brain wave stimulating subliminal perception program from ClydeSight Productions. (See link at bottom of page.) In small 15-minute sessions, it sends hundreds of positive affirmations about enjoying working on projects and tasks to the unconscious mind, removing the fear and inspiring enthusiasm. This helps stop procrastination by addressing it at the source, the unconscious attitude about projects and tasks.

There are some self hypnosis programs that have the same goals available also. One aspect of self hypnosis programs is that they are audio based and you can listen to them while you are sleeping.

These types of mental self help products are a great addition to helping you improve your time management skill because they help stop procrastination by addressing the emotional aspects of projects and tasks. They complete the time management picture.

Managing time is required in today's modern world and many products are available to help you improve your time management skill. Most are pretty mechanical and unemotional in nature, based on efficiency through planning. This can be a good and beneficial approach to time management. But it is only "one piece of the puzzle."

The mental aspect of time management also needs to be addressed. Most time management skill systems are missing this component. So we must look "outside the box" to complete the equation.

That solution, the other half of the equation, can come from a good and effective mental self help program. A properly designed "stop procrastination" program, focused on affirmations to stop procrastination by changing our emotional feelings about projects and tasks, can be the final "piece" of the time management equation.

With these two tools, we can manage our time well, and enjoy the process at the same time.