A Valuable Time Management Tool: Rewarding yourself

 Incentives are all around.  Think about it!  There is the company wide bonus for achieving the customer service satisfaction goal; next is the reward for the most productive team member; the boss also recognizes the most efficient worker, the most enthusiastic assistant, and so forth.  The list of recognitions is seemingly endless.  Yet what about getting recognized yourself?  Do you reward yourself for the things you did well?  Do you recognize yourself for the accomplishments you have celebrated?  While the boss may not have noticed your daily struggle to meet the deadlines, you have. Yet have you taken the time to reward yourself?

Rewards do not need to be outlandish.  They should be realistic, in keeping with your budget, and something out of the ordinary.  For example, if you go out to eat each Friday night, this customary trip to the restaurant is not the same as a personal reward.  You would have gone anyways.  Perhaps an additional dinner out on another night of the week would be in order!

Similarly, your personal rewards should be tied to realistic, and achievable, goals.  Do not raise your bar so high that you cannot possibly achieve it.  You may wish to reward yourself for accomplished short term, mid term, and also long term goals.  This system of rewards will permit you to stay on task, and to also see some direct positive results from your hard work.  

It is interesting to note that rewarding yourself will not only increase your personal morale, but it will actually have a positive effect on your time management.  Are rewards a valuable time management tool?  Yes!

Time management demands a firm grasp of what you are doing with your time.  By scheduling your appointments, you keep your day on track and your customers and clients happy.  By scheduling your leisure time (or reward time) you will keep yourself happy.  By combining both schedules, you will find a realistic set of time that you have left to accomplish the work that will not take you out of the office. At the same time, this combined schedule will remind you of the reward in store for the successful completion of the project, meeting of the deadline, or any other short term reward you may have chosen.  In a way, this reward will be the dangling carrot in a world of office politics, next to impossible deadlines, and telephones ringing off the hook!

Rewards will also become highly effective time management tools when you consider how much harder this form of self motivation will make you work to accomplish your set goal.  Goal setting in itself is a major component of effective time management, and it is easy to see how a desirable reward could be a great form of motivation.

Another aspect that draws a clear correlation between the art of time management and the carrot of rewards is the simple fact that a highly motivated individual will focus on a project and perform all steps needed to accomplish it.  In other words, if you have your recreational time planned, and your appointments set up, the remainder of the time is yours to decide how to make it work the best for the needs you have of it.  Suddenly the game of computer Solitaire is no longer so enticing when you realize that it may very well take away from the opportunity to accomplish the short term goal and the coveted reward.  Naturally, personal wastes of time are only part of the issue.  The other part revolves around the proper usage of all available resources, such as co-workers, team members, and even bosses!  Train up your fellow workers so that they may assist you competently and confidently with some of the tasks you have to do.  By delegating as much as possible, you will soon find yourself with an easy to handle workload that is not threatening to overwhelm you.

Last but not least, proper planning of both work and fun time will allow you to have a healthy balance in your life.  With a healthy balance, you will be able to manage your time effective and consistently.