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 boring "brute force time management" techniques can work for a while, but if they're not fun, easy or natural, like anything people eventually just stop doing them. I know I would rather learn ways to improve my time management which are easy and come naturally to me.

I think Buckminster Fuller got it right when he said "Environment is stronger than will power". Think about it for a minute. If you're trying to lose weight, but you're sitting in the middle of a candy factory, how had do you think it will be to not eat candy? On the other hand, if you're living in a health spa, I bet you could avoid eating candy much easier, even probably start working out too.

Most people don't even stop to think about their environment as they go about trying to improve their time management skills. I think the idea of creating an environment to support your productivity and time management success is something to consider. Try something here for a minute and see what you think.

Sit for a moment and see what you see in your work space. Choose five obvious elements in your work space and pose yourself the following question "Does what I'm looking at right now help me reach my productivity and time management goals or get in the way of reaching those same 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!

These two examples might seem silly, but you get the point. Eliminating the non-supportive elements in your environment is the first step to creating an environment that supports your goals to be better at time management.

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.