Time Management for Your Livelihood

This article was written by Denise Landers of Entrepreneur.com

What smart lessons you can learn from small children! One day I was watching two youngsters, aged 3 and 5, playing with "bricks" made of heavy cardboard. The brick blocks came in three sizes: a 10-by-16-inch rectangle, a 10-inch square and the standard 3-by-10-inch size. They spent hours creating structures.

When they first started, they didn't understand that larger pieces provided a stronger foundation for the smaller pieces, so their constructions would come tumbling down before they'd used all their bricks. With lots of trial and error, the children discovered that if they started with the biggest size, they were more likely to be able to use all their bricks.

An effective daily schedule can also be constructed with blocks of three sizes. How much you can pile on -- or how productive you are each day -- depends on how well you organize your "blocks" of time....