Time management for many of us seems to be full of un-fun things like following a boring process, mental discipline, stale techniques to help avoid procrastination so we can be more productive with our time.

Those kind of “Brute Force Time Management” techniques can work, but there are also other things you can do to help you manage your time better; things which take very little time and precious little mental will power.

Buckminster Fuller (or “Bucky Fuller” as he was called by his friends) is reported to have said “Environment is stronger than will power”. Sounds smart, doesn’t it? Consider this. If you’re out of shape and want to improve your health, how hard would that be to do if you’re locked in room full of delicious sugar cookies. On the flip side, how easy would that be to do if you lived inside of a fitness center? Pretty easy don’t you think?

This same sort of idea goes for almost everything, yet most people don’t think about setting up the right environment for efficient time management. In fact, most people kind of think of anything having to do with time management as a chore. Let’s turn that around.

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?”

If the element you’re looking at doesn’t support your time management efforts, eliminate it from your environment right then and there.

Most people have at least one element they should toss. Oddly enough, when doing this exercise, people suddenly see their television as a major distraction. Something that not only slows their productivity, but which also can completely destroy your ability to accomplish your daily goals. If you have a television in your work space, unplug it and move it out of the 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.