Time Management Exercises?  What the heck?  But seriously.  Time management is a skill, and as with all skills, practice makes for improvement if not necessarily perfection.  But what sorts of exercises could help you practice time management?  Read on and find out!

Just like you can exercise your muscles and your brain, you can build your time management skills by practicing some of the sub-skills that are involved.

And as I was looking around for ideas about time management exercises, I remembered where I had read the perfect exercises to practice those sub-skills:  In an old book that had been sitting on my bookshelf for years. That book was on dieting, but its lessons apply just as much to making the most of time, especially by getting a grip on procrastination.

The book, "How to get yourself to stay on any diet," whose author is Charles Whetherall, starts from the premise that in order to be successful at dieting, you must exercise your willpower.  No, not merely use your willpower, though that is included, but to literally give it a regular workout so that it will get better at keeping you on track. 

While this is no longer necessarily considered the ultimate solution to dieting -- although that varies from guru to guru, it can be very useful for reducing problems with procrastination.  In fact, these same exercises might work even better on time management than on dieting.

So what are the exercises?  To some degree, they all involve doing specific activities, whether or not you feel like doing them.  I'm sure you can immediately see the ramifications of that particular approach.

The types of exercises in the book include: 
1) Doing what's disagreeable (like washing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom). 
2) Doing what's pointless (like counting a bag full of dried beans or the number of ribs in a sweater. 
3. Doing something immediately, whether you feel like it or not.
4) Postpone doing something you would prefer to do right away. 

Whetherall argues that doing these kinds of exercises regularly will strengthen your willpower and help you get a better handle on your diet.  And, by extension, as time management exercises, they can also help you reduce procrastination.