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When the topic of better “time management” comes up, many people’s eyes glaze over as they mentally prepared to be bored by a conversation full of dull techniques, forcing yourself to do things that aren’t natural for you and maybe things that just aren’t fun for us to do.

Those boring “brute force time management” techniques can work for a while, but if they’re not fun, easy or natural, like anything people eventually just stop doing them. I know I would rather learn ways to improve my time management which are easy and come naturally to me.

A very smart man named “Buckminster Fuller” is quoted as saying “Environment is stronger than will power”. I think he got it right. If you’re overweight and trying to avoid sugar, how hard do you think that would be if you have a box of candy sitting on your desk at the office? Now if instead, there was a plate of fresh cut vegetables there instead, you’d probably find it pretty easy to avoid sugar at that moment don’t you think?

Similar ideas about creating the right environment for success can be applied to almost every area of your life, but most people rarely consider their environment when they are trying to improve their time management skills. Indeed, time management is considered to be a boring topic for most because it’s somewhat of a chore to do. Let’s do a simple experiment to prove how your environment factors into your ability to manage your time better.

From wherever you’re at, look at what you can see around your workspace. Pick a few simple items around the room and ask you’re the question “Do these items support my time management and productivity goals or do they steal my energy from reaching those goals?”

No “maybe” answers allowed. If an item you picked does not explicitly support your time management and productivity goals, immediately toss it out or otherwise remove it from your workspace.

If you’re honest with yourself, you probably have a few easy things you can eliminate. Televisions sets are famous for being a major distraction. Beyond just distracting you for a moment, they also entice you to keep watching for hours upon hours, thus making it much hard to get your goals accomplished for the day. If there is a television in your workspace, get rid of it right away by disconnecting it or even relocating it to another room.

A messy desk full of papers can be another distraction from your productivity and efforts for better time management. Just ask yourself the simple question of whether having a messy desk supports your productivity or detracts from it. Beyond aesthetics, a messy desk makes it harder to find your important papers and can cost you more time as you have to hunt to find them. Help yourself out, clean up your desk!

I used 2 simple examples here because they help make the point clearly. Getting rid of anything in your work space that does not support your productivity and time management goals is critical to your success.

After eliminating the elements from your environment which do not support your productivity and time management goals, the next step will be to actually add things to your environment which make it easier to manage your time. We share tips on how to do this in some of my other articles.

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