Never before have time management skills been as important as they are now. Life today is extremely busy for most of us. In the private sector, ask any working mother or a college student working part time to pay for an education. And in the business sector, ask any business owner trying to juggle a number of priorities at the one time.

With improved time management skills we can make the shift from reactive to pro-active, we can set goals and have the time to work towards them. It's no secret that those of us who can manage our time better, get more things done.

When one has the time to give priority to the issues in our daily business or private lives that need urgent attention, the stress levels drop & we're able to manage our resources in a more effective manner.

Here's 21 Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Time Management Skills

1. Be decisive
2. Set clear goals & objectives
3. Set a daily work plan, the night before
4. Prioritize tasks using A - B - C - D then re-prioritize A tasks using 1 - 2 - 3 to identify the most urgent
5. Separate the urgent from the important
6. Use the law of enforced efficiency, what is the highest value use of your time?
7. Use the 80/20 rule to improve your time management skills by identifying the tasks that will have the greatest benefit & do those first
8. Develop stamina & high energy through regular exercise & diet
9. Develop single-handling skills to concentrate on one task at a time
10. Eat the ugly toad first, do the hardest thing first up
11. Organize your workspace by using the acronym TRAF: Toss - Refer - Action - File
12. Use travel time to listen to educational CD's & prepare work schedules
13. Develop expertise in key tasks through practice & repetition
14. Work in real time, at a fast tempo & develop an ongoing sense of urgency
15. Time management skills generally improve automatically when you learn to make decisions quickly, with no ifs or buts
16. Re-engineer work processes, map them out & identify what needs to be done and works towards reducing the number of steps by 30%
17. Reinvent yourself once a year. Identify what you need to do to become more productive because the only constant in life is change
18. Ask yourself the following on a regular basis - knowing what I know right now, would I do things the same way
19. Set priorities, identify what tasks you can procrastinate on, that is, the lower priorities can wait. The 80% of tasks that have less value and only contribute 20% of the productivity
20. Decide to work to live, not live to work. This means working towards a balanced life. It's the quantity of time on downtime and the quality of time at work to aim for
21. Be intensely action orientated. It's acting & executing that generates results

There you have it, 21 ways to improve YOUR time management skills. Implement just a few and you'll be way ahead of the pack.