Personal Skill Development Techniques
After analyzing the areas of personal development I would like to work on and going through a number of articles, I have chosen 4 of them, which teach different techniques on how to manage stress, time and how to not lose focus. I tried using all of the mentioned techniques for 2 weeks and see how they would benefit my studies and life in general. The idea was to improve my everyday life and see how effective the techniques would be in such matter.
While identifying skills and behaviors I would like to develop, I tried to focus on those that would actually positively affect my every day life and my studies in particular. In the modern world of almost immediate information exchange, globalization and required multitasking for practically any job, people lack time for simple daily activities, without even mentioning their work time. Lack of time leads to a high level of stress and distraction from the tasks that really matter. Moreover, people tend to lose focus and spend their time inefficiently, while stressing time consuming activities that bring no benefits. Insufficient time and lack of focus lead to stress, which, in turn, leads to lower productivity and overall dissatisfaction with one’s job and life.
The first skill I wanted to improve was time management. Knowing how to spend one’s time and how to effectively prioritize activities opens up large opportunities for increased effectiveness at work and life in general. I wanted to focus on this skill in order to have more time for my studies, personal life and leisure activities. Beverly D. Flaxington suggests a number of techniques that help to be proficient in time management and to get yourself into a better mental and emotional place. The first one is to focus on your weaknesses, as it would allow to find your Achilles’ heel and better understand what has to be improved and what is great already. This would help to identify the obstacles on the way to success and learn how to get over them. Another technique is to get rid of to-do lists, as they only mention what has to be done and not what is really important and on what tasks to focus. The next technique is to focus on the top 3 tasks every day and leave out the rest for when you actually have time for it. Flaxington also suggests breaking your to-do list into discrete steps and prioritizing the tasks that matter today and are the most valuable. The last technique is to be jealous of your own time as time is what really matters in life, because it is limited, so we should not spend too much time on Facebook or Instagram or any other social network (Flaxington 2015).
After reading all the suggestions from the author, I have focused on my time and how I spend it for two weeks. I tried prioritizing my activities, however it was quite …
