Welcome to our podcast listeners, wherever you may be in the world today! This is Steve Shallenberger. Your host for the Becoming Your Best podcast series.
Today, we have an exciting subject. It is Five Simple, Innovative Ways to Great Time Management. And to preface this a little bit, I’d like to share an experience that I had not long ago.
We were visiting our son and his wife, west of Phoenix, Arizona near the White Tank Mountains. It is beautiful but it’s rugged mountain terrain. One morning we hiked up three miles up a ravine and we arrived at a waterfall. We enjoyed the captivating area where the American Indians made their home and we decided to jog down the trail.
Now, this was an interesting experience. As we navigated the trail at about four miles per hour, I was utterly amazed at how my mind and body worked together. Knowing exactly how to adjust to an ever-changing terrain. A boulder here and a dip there, a rattlesnake slithering along the side of the trail, literally, a spiny cactus.
As we gradually went up and down, descending safely back to where the cars were parked. This experience caused me to reflect on how our body system works together, as we navigate through the daily challenges of life. Just as our body adjusted to the terrain as we jogged, over a trail in the mountains. Or your mind or heart adjusts to the terrain of relationships, your work, and everything you face from moment to moment. This is amazing, this great tool that we are blessed to have. It’s literally, this principle of prioritizing time allows us to merge our heart, and mind, and memory consistently. So that we can achieve a sustainable best and doing the things that really count most in our life.
Repetition is crucial to the development of both muscle memory and heart and mind memory. One moment of creativity or being quick to listen really helps as we solve issues. Day to day they make us more effective in time management. This is really powerful as we’re going to talk about these five simple, innovative ways to be great time managers. So, here we go.
The first one is one we’ve talked about in the past. But it is absolutely a fundamental game changer. And it is to spend a few minutes each weekend doing pre-week planning. We use the example of you happen to be a pilot, let’s say a commercial pilot or a fighter pilot or even a private pilot. If you had a complex flight coming up, going from one coast to the next. Or navigating through some desolate areas, how many of you would just go jump in the plane and take off? Well, no. It’d be crazy to do that. Suicide is what it would be. Well, how many of us do the very same thing as we start each week? We just go in from week in, week out with no thought. We jump in the cockpit and we show up to work. We do whatever we’re doing. Well, we get the same type of results frequently. This little process of pre-flight planning in the pilot world assures the highest probability of a successful flight. Unless something just unusual goes wrong. Well, this is the very same way with our week. Pre-week planning allows us to assure, with some probability, some things could happen, that we’re going to have a great week. That’s just the way it turns out.
Listen to the full episode…