Time management is a struggle for many people nowadays. We’ve got so much to do in both our personal and work lives – and so little time to make it all happen. If you’re a manager, executive, or startup leader, time management becomes more of a challenge: you need to juggle both your team’s requirements and your own.
Having said that, there are lots of ways to improve your time management skills. Tons of tools and techniques are available to help you in this endeavor. Here are seven of my favorites:
1. Create a Program and Stick to It
Start improving your time management skills by organizing your days and weeks ahead of time. There’ll always be surprises, but it is very likely that you have some idea about the sorts of tasks and duties you have to handle every day.
If you are feeling a bit lost, spend a week or two monitoring each and every thing you do every day. This can allow you to identify patterns and recurring tasks, which you can then integrate into your own schedule.
2. Prioritize
The next lesson in time management is learning how to prioritize. To effectively execute any endeavor, you want to determine which stages or elements of this project are important to your company and the effects of every stage/component in the short, medium, and long term.
To put it differently, you must find out which tasks or actions will provide the best returns. This way you can prioritize these over less important jobs.
3. Set Some Boundaries
If you want your staff and family to allow you to work in peace, you want to notify them when you are not offered. People can not read your mind, so it is your responsibility to set boundaries when necessary. You do not want to seem rude, so make sure you communicate your limits in a polite — but direct — way.
To make this work, You’ll Have to make a few things clear to everyone:
- Which hours of the day you do not wish to be disturbed in any way, except in the event of an emergency.
- What counts as an “emergency.”
- When you’re free to take quick phone calls or answer simple requests.
- How your staff should proceed to program long-duration meetings for more complicated problems.
4. Account for Great Distractions
However hard you try, you’ll get distracted here and there. That’s a simple fact of life. Furthermore, nobody can work for hours and hours. Most of us need breaks to help us remain productive. The best thing to do would be to take that distractions will occur and try to integrate them into your own schedule.
Block out some downtime throughout your program daily. This may mean setting aside a couple of minutes here or there to get a cup of coffee, a walk in the corridor, or even a trip outside for some fresh air. These fractures are especially important when you work at a desk all day long.
You may even use your breaks to try out some stress management methods, like breathing exercises, meditation, or yoga.
5. Keep Away from the Bad Distractions
If there’s an excellent side to distractions, there’s also a negative side. If a diversion takes up a lot of your time, you’ll end up heavily behind on work. So, get to know which distractions tend to drain a lot of your time — and then make every attempt to avoid these distractions.
By way of example, you might want to keep away from social media during the workday. You might also wish to keep your email window closed before you’re ready to sort through your inbox. Leaving the tab open in the background may be a enormous diversion — every new email that comes in will make you want to veer from the job at hand. The same holds for app notifications.
6. Get Some Tech Help
There are lots of time management apps out there for the two Android and iOS apparatus. These may help you boost your productivity and make certain you’re doing what needs to be done.
By way of instance, if you would like to know where all of your time is going, you should try something like Rescue Time or Toggl.
If your objective is to maintain your calendar in order, download Cal or aCalendar.
If you will need some help keeping distractions off, give Focus Booster a shot.
If your to-do list is in disarray, then Trello may be ideal for you.
These are simply a couple of the choices out there. There is a time management program for everyone nowadays. If you’re not fond of those suggestions, you can certainly find something else that suits your requirements. Just do a little digging.
7. Never Procrastinate
If it can be done now, do it now. This rule should be your motto if you would like to earn the most of your time.
Take it a step further: If something on your program changes, and you wind up with extra time prior to the close of the day, begin on the next day’s tasks without thinking twice. It’s far better to complete your week before on Friday than it is to get stuck working on a last-minute job.
Time management requires discipline, preparation, a powerful attitude, and the support of a couple of good tech tools. But if you get it right, it will surely pay off in terms of greater productivity and reduced stress levels.
Give these tips a try and find out what works for you. Your team, your partners, your customers, and even your loved ones and friends will be a lot more happy to be around you when you’re relaxed and on top of things.