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Time management tips embrace a powerful array of techniques to keep others from stealing your time. This is an ideal time for you to look over the past year to assess the cost of crisis junkies in your life. What do you do when strong personalities make excessive demands on you?

Some crisis junkies may be in positions of authority over you and regularly confront you with ’surprise’ deadlines or requests to salvage plans that have gone awry. Others may whittle away your time begging for your assistance in the face of repeated emergencies in their lives. If you are not careful, they can easily sabotage your plans for your time.

How do you withstand others’ crises without endangering your job and your professional relationships? Here are some ideas that may help you win back your time and avoid needless crises of your own:

7 Proven Tips to Stay on Track, Strengthen Relationships and Save Time

Crisis Management Tip #1: Refuse to be swept along by others’ urgency.

Urgency is a key weapon of strong personalities. Do not make their crisis your crisis. By taking time to carefully consider your response, you demonstrate that you retain full responsibility for yourself.

If you are attentive and empathic to others’ distress, you can ask for time to consider the best response without appearing indifferent to them. Let them know you will get back to them within a certain time frame once you have explored the matter.

Crisis Management Tip #2: Observe and Evaluate.

Examine your level of responsibility for the problem, and your stake in the outcome. With this overview, you can decide how much time to devote, if any, to solving their problem.

The more clearly you differentiate between others’ challenges and your own, the more everyone can count on you to meet your own responsibilities.

Crisis Management Tip #3: Use active listening to transfer the power to define the situation from others to you.

By re-stating their predicament in your own words, you re-frame the incident, and also:

* Lower the drama of the moment. You defuse time urgency by summarizing the situation calmly, in accurate but less highly charged terms.

* Affirm that you understand them. When others feel heard, they instinctively relax and take more time to listen to your ideas.

* Provide yourself with a valuable cushion of time to think over the specifics of the problem from your vantage point, not theirs.

Crisis Management Tip #4: Broaden the perspective.

Strategizing from multiple vantage points reduces the tunnel vision that urgency promotes. Identify areas of consensus. You can empathize while retaining a balanced view.

As soon as you increase the number of views for approaching the problem, you stop placing the person who makes the request at the center of the situation. And by countering the natural egocentricity of the person who perceives a crisis, you make room to add your personal considerations, as well.

Crisis Management Tip #5: Offer the choices that align with your time frame.

Succeed through identifying everyone’s baseline needs and negotiate accordingly. Clearly state your parameters, so that your own projects remain on schedule.

Resist any temptation you may feel to give in to guilt. Every time you protect your own legitimate concerns, you provide a valuable role model that may help those who seek your assistance manage their time better in the future.

Crisis Management Tip #6: Allow others their responses.

This may be the hardest challenge for you. Cultivate calmness so you can accept others’ dissatisfaction without defensiveness. This demonstrates you respect their right to their feelings and that your time priorities don’t require their approval.

You may even say, “I know this is difficult for you.” Empathy and assertiveness can go hand in hand.

Crisis Management Tip #7: Remain focused on your areas of control.

Take the time to clarify your end of relationships. Specify what you feel comfortable doing, and the amount of time you are willing to spend doing it. By being clear, you encourage open communication that can lead to genuine progress.

Assimilating this in advance is excellent preparation. Your relationships are often unspoken contracts. As you change your part, prepare yourself for other aspects of interactions to shift. For example, as you become less available at the last-minute, others may be asked to help. Or you may be called upon to coordinate schedules and priorities more closely with colleagues. This might shake up your image of yourself as indispensable, or your image of others as ‘impossible’.

Ultimately, with skillful negotiating, you benefit by enjoying more productive, crisis-free time.

How will you build on your success by developing still more rewarding methods for finding time?

Tips and Guides: Coach Paula Eder, Ph.D., The Time Finder, has 35 years of success helping individuals and small businesses align time with values. For free Time Templates + Tips, visit Finding Time Enjoy our blog! TheTimeFinder