The POSEC method enables you to dissect your goals and tasks into small projects. It enables you to prioritize things because accomplishing your individual tasks well will make the rest of your goals easier to attain. While for some people the POSEC method may work quite well, for others it may not.

The POSEC method of time management offers guidelines for helping the individual put their goals in order of importance. As a result, proper execution would cause upward movement on Maslow’s “Needs Hierarchy."

The following steps constitute the POSEC method of time management.

Prioritize - Define your tasks according to your goals and prioritize your allocation of time.  This means to tackle your daily tasks in order of importance so as to create personal efficiency and team effectiveness. The POSEC method of time management is loosely based on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Organize - Giving an orderly structure to the goals one has to accomplish regularly. By doing so, one gains a feeling of security and freedom by meeting the most basic needs such as food, shelter, and clothing among others. Other tasks may include daily tasks such as punctuality during meetings, administrative tasks, and organizing your desk to more easily access necessary equipment.

Streamline - Streamlining normally applies to the small jobs that you must do although no one really likes to do them such as washing dishes, and other household chores. These tasks are required for you to do, while not fond of doing them.  It involves making the jobs simpler and maintaining efficiency and security.

Economize - Creating economy involves those things that you must do or would like to do, but are not needed to be done with any degree of urgency. Economizing would entail such tasks as acquiring new skills, taking part in projects that you enjoy, and engaging in personal development, among others. These tasks are frequently at the bottom of the list of priorities.

Contribute - Contribution can be done by paying attention to those tasks whose measure of benefit may not be evident immediately, but make a difference in the long run.   These contributions to humanity as acts such as kindness and thoughtfulness, among others.  According to Maslow’s understanding of the motivation, contribution involves the social setting where one gives back to the world, thereby making your goals more attainable.

Using time efficiently in our day to day lives can help us make more money, gain independence from money pressures, and eventually help us realize a philosophical comprehension of time. The most likely reason that we do not attain our lifelong goals is the monetary restriction imposed upon us due to life’s twists and turns. If we assume independence from any white collar worker’s typical day in the office, we can embrace an additional easiness of time management. When given more time, we become silent.  Silence’s effectiveness leads way to developing greater strength, truth and power. These traits lead the way to a happier life.

Take a look at your day to day activities for personal and financial success through effective time management:

Organizing your time according to the Eisenhower method makes logical sense, you develop skills to separate the urgent from the important and thereby proceed with more efficiency. Check with yourself on every issue and fit it into the mental diagram below:

Urgent and important - to do immediately
Important yet not Urgent - enter this into your calendar
Urgent yet not Important  - Delegate this generously while reducing involvement
Not Important as well as Not Urgent - Dispose Promptly into the Trash

If we are reacting to or receiving from our environment, Dwight Eisenhower’s method of Time Management makes a great deal of sense. If our work is dependent, this method prioritizes our work tasks.  However, we should also go a step further and see about planning and spending effectiveness.

Let’s examine the "time quadrant". In the time quadrant are the dimensions Importance and Urgency.  Once again we’re not looking at work priority this time, but how to plan our time to plan our life.

It has been said by Steven Covey in his work, "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" in habit number 3, that putting the most important things first is an important lesson regarding time management.

Important as well as urgent - Daily Fire Fighting

Most people spend a majority of time in this get nowhere rat race. Take care to reduce the time you spend in this on this quadrant and be quick to delegate.

Not Urgent but Important - Think strategically about the big picture.

Look for the forest instead of the tree. Maximize your quality time spent in this area.

Urgent but not Important - Someone else’s emergency, not yours

Minimize your investment in these activities.  This is a where unhappy people spend most of their time.

Neither Urgent nor Important - Time Wasters

These activities are such as when you gossip over the phone, watch television, surf the internet for recreation.  Be certain to minimize on this.

Even when spending the majority of time in the strategic mode of thinking and, even when planning carefully, we can be overwhelmed with our day to day lives. To attain clarity and strength again we can retreat for a while. Somewhere along the line contentment along with happiness will set in if you develop your personal time allotments thereby helping you to truly be a fully inwardly motivated person.

Augustine of Hippo pointed out, "there is only one word written on the eternal clock - now!" He used this metaphor to encourage us to not procrastinate. We also need to use intuition to make wise decisions. There is often not time to collect the information required to make informed decisions. We live in a very complex world and should not take the time to gather all the information when we frequently use our own intuition.

Ultimately, we need to give equal priority to our family or friends, leisure or pleasure as we do toward work.

By applying these simple time management methods to your life can help you become more effective as a professional as well as bringing yourself in into greater awareness of time. Increasing your own consciousness of a thing is the basis of improvement.

Here’s what Dr. Donald Wetmore an American Time Management Specialist says:

Training is not a cost it’s an investment

‘It really doesn’t matter what we pay for an investment. What’s relevant is what we get in return. One of the best ways to jeopardize an company’s future in today’s world and increase the probability of troubled times it to look at training as a cost and pay the price of not training or provide substandard training that operates only as a Band-Aid for the training requirements.

A person being paid $50,000 per year who is wasting just one hour per day is costs $6,250 per year. If through one of our Time Management Seminars that person can learn how to recapture just one hour per day, that translates into a payback of $6,250 per year!

If there is a group of 25 people, the return on that is $156,250 per year! That doesn’t even include other benefits like profitability, reduced turnover, improved morale, enhanced teamwork, greater creativity etc.)

Over 5 years, the payback is $781,250. What would you invest in to achieve that return and payback?

Not so many years ago, training was an option for most companies. Today it is no longer an option. If any of us continue to do what we do the same way, within five years most of us will become obsolete. Why? Because our competitors are helping their people to become more effective through training.

If we look closely at companies who are doing well in the long run, they almost always have a well thought out training program in place

They realize the price for not training is the real expense of training’.

The most important training or knowledge enhancement you can offer to your employees is in the personal development area. Effective time management is a life skill which affects us all. Depending on how skilful we are at managing our time it can have a major impact on the whole of our life. Our skill levels in this area can greatly benefit us or cause us to be constantly stressed out.

Training is a life long endeavor. It has to be ongoing. Life changes constantly and so do our needs and those of our people, the #1 asset in every business. Time Management training is crucial for it’s when we learn to use our time effectively that we get so much more done in our lives.

Lorraine Pirihi is Australia’s Personal Productivity Specialist and Leading Life Coach. Her business The Office Organizer specializes in showing small business owners and managers, how to get organized at work so they can have a life! Lorraine is also a dynamic speaker and has produced many products including “How to Survive and Thrive at Work!”
To subscribe to her free ezine visit http://www.office-organiser.com.au/