5 Time Management Tips

Time Management

Time management at the workplace remains one of the biggest woes of the contemporary corporate culture. You start your day fresh, energetic, and hopeful – totally optimistic about meeting all your deadlines, hitting the gym, and ending your day the best way.

Then life happens. You leave home late, hitting a nightmarish traffic jam. And by the time you get to your work desk, you’re already late and frustrated. Looking at your deadlines, you realize that you’re already late for that first, all-important meeting. The cherry on top, there are plenty more to follow till noon.

These are just a few of the countless possible scenarios that almost all of us encounter daily, striving to create some breathing space for ourselves while juggling with the set of priorities lined up ahead.

The good news is that there are ways for you to get out of this vicious circle before it leads you to the point of burnout. And this is where you resort to the concept of time management – managing your time instead of letting it control your life.

5 Time Management Tips That Actually Work

We’ve compiled a list of time-tested time management tips that actually work. Run through them thoroughly to identify what you’re missing and what you can do to realign your work ethics to an optimal outcome.

Tip 1: Be Mindful in Scheduling Your Day

There’s no denying the significance of scheduling your day. But it doesn’t mean throwing everything you have into your Cute Kittens calendar and expecting things to start streamlining for you.

Instead, you need to put your head into the game to have a highly productive and efficient schedule. Here are a few critical areas for you to focus on to optimize your task scheduling:

Define Your Why

Let there be no doubt about one thing; not everything we need to do is fun. In fact, most of the tasks in our to-do lists are the ones we would skip given the option. You can always count on your grit and resolve to power through such situations, but it saps your energy levels.

To avoid that, you better find internal motivation by identifying your why. Everyone has a different why behind what they choose to do, which gives them the purpose and meaning to do any particular thing.

The credit of this concept’s mass-popularisation goes to Simon Sinek through his book “Start with Why”. His book unveils the power of “why” in motivating individuals and businesses in reaching their goals very aptly.

Your why should outweigh your “because I have to” or “because he/she told me to”. For instance, if you’re an individual, this “why” might be about providing your family with a better and happier life. And for a business, it can be “to help people succeed”.

Once you have a clearly identified “why” as a person or a business, your actions and efforts should be directed to fulfill it.

Learn to Prioritize

There are literally infinite possibilities of spending every single day of your life. And, no one can do everything. That’s why you need to learn to prioritize your stuff so that you don’t end up wasting your time and efforts on jobs that lead you nowhere eventually.

It becomes even more critical if you’re leading or managing a team. Your team can only set the team’s focus right when they know where to direct the most of their time and effort.

One of the best ways to pull this off successfully is to figure out what you want to be done based on how important, urgent, rewarding, or meaningful a goal is in service to your why.

So, get everything on a piece of paper. Start by eliminating things that don’t serve your why amply enough, and align your priorities according to their importance.

Learn to Estimate Timelines Rightly

One of the biggest hurdles that keep people from optimizing their task-scheduling is the inability to estimate how long a task/project will complete. No matter how hard you try to align your schedule without a good idea of task completion, it’s very likely to fail.

It becomes even more critical when taking care of multiple projects simultaneously. A little over or underestimation in even a few tasks can culminate to mess up your entire week’s schedule.

So, you must learn to estimate your tasks as accurately as possible and encourage your team to do the same as well. For instance, you should know how long it takes you to write 1000 words if you’re a writer or manage a team of writers.

You can even take a week or two to assess the average time it takes you to complete different tasks you may have to work on in a specific role. It will help you better map out your schedule, contribute to optimizing your overall task completion, and improve your odds of success.

Tip 2: Get Rid of Distractions

Get ready to encounter endless distractions when you’re striving to steer your life on the right track. The worst part is that most of them come wrapped in irresistible guises, giving you the illusion of outstanding results. Only you can save yourself from falling to them, not letting them divert you from achieving your long-term goals and bigger targets.

It means you need to learn the art of eliminating distractions if you have some dreams to follow and aspirations to achieve.

We’re sharing various ways of how you can eliminate and overcome distractions in your workplace to stay on track:

Be Clear About Your Daily Tasks

You’ll be doing yourself a great favor if you can dedicate a few minutes daily in the morning to contemplate the tasks ahead before you start your workday. The Covey Time Management Matrix can be an excellent resource for you in doing so.

It helps you segregate your tasks into four different quadrants, i.e., vitally important and urgent, important but not urgent, not so important but urgent, and tasks that are neither important nor urgent but you need them done anyhow.

Your productivity will jump to the next level once you get a knack for segregating your tasks in the Covey time management matrix. With so much clarity on your tasks, you’ll be able to identify which tasks need your time and attention on an urgent basis, which ones to put on hold for a while, and which ones to delegate or eliminate altogether.

Set Your Workplace Right

You must have your workplace set up to help focus on the task at hand, eliminating distractions and unnecessary breaks. Though a colorful and vibrant background is friendly to your eyes, it can steer your focus away unnecessarily. So, it’s better to empty the wall in front of you.

Similarly, it’s better to have a minimalist tabletop, enabling a free energy flow. And don’t undermine your physical needs. Have some water and a light snack handy if you feel hungry or thirsty— no need to take a break now and then to get them.

Make It Loud and Clear

Whether you’re working from home or office, you need to be loud and clear to everyone around you. Tell them straight to avoid disturbing you when you are on a deadline. Give them a definite time when you’ll be available for them and when you want to remain focused on work undisturbed.

Being successful in eliminating unwanted distractions, you’ll have more time at your disposal to complete a task, improving your overall time management. It will also give you more time to mingle with your coworkers or family when you complete a job on time.

Tip 3: Work on Your Self Awareness

Have you ever found yourself wondering why you feel the way you do? You better, because your ability to recognize and understand your emotions can be the single most crucial factor in determining your success or failure.

It’s as surprising as it is unfortunate that many people are not fully self-aware, ultimately hurting their communication and performance.

Here are the most vital aspects of self-awareness, improving your overall emotional intelligence and productivity.

Self-Concept

Self-concept is your perception about yourself, how you see and feel about yourself! Though countless factors lead you collectively to perceive yourself in a certain way, the most important ones include your past experiences, your future expectations, and your faith in your abilities.

If you have a positive and healthy self-concept, your potential of taking on challenges, achieving goals, and living an overall empowered life increases significantly. Make sure you’re investing enough time in exploring and improving your self-concept.

Thoughts

Our emotions and thoughts are tied together much closely and complexly than we ever care to imagine and understand. So, it’s imperative to understand our thought processes better to improve the understanding of our emotions.

One way of doing this is to consider what you believe and say about yourself and what you say about different situations you encounter.

If you find yourself not thinking positively about yourself, indulge in mindfulness to discover the reason behind your thoughts. Then, try to replace them with more positive thoughts.

It might be more demanding for most of you beyond your imagination. But keeping your faith and spirit high is the key to inducing a high level of positivity in your thoughts.

Emotions

Your emotions have a significant role in how you interact with others. People boasting of higher emotional intelligence outdo the rest of us in recognizing and accepting our varying emotional states. And if you are aware of your emotional state, you improve your chances of bettering your personal and professional relationships.

Tip 4: Create Manageable Chunks of Your Tasks

Most people feel uncomfortable taking up new tasks and challenges, often losing sight of the main objective due to the pressure of managing so many things. Lack of motivation hits them despite knowing the importance and urgency of the task.

And this isn’t true just for some megaproject; even meager tasks like dishwashing and exercising turn into dead ends. Amongst other reasons, that’s also because of how the task is presented to you in its totality.

The good news is that you can overcome this ordeal quite easily. Here’s how:

Get a Bird’s-eye View of the Project

Whether a project intimidates you or not, getting a bird’s-eye view can help you handle it well. Get a sheet of paper and draw a circle through its middle region. Fill it out by writing in the project’s core idea at hand, followed by a handful of lines drawing out of the initial circle.

Draw smaller circles at the end of each line, writing down smaller tasks that contribute to completing the primary task. Repeat the same drill for any circles that you think are filled with a job that’s still unmanageable at this stage.

Continue repeating the process until all circles contain a smaller task that you can complete individually. It will help you chunk down the main project into smaller tasks, giving you a visual map of the whole project, making it easier and more manageable for you to deal with.

Create a Timeline

Moving forward, arrange all the smaller tasks on a new sheet of paper chronologically, listing the most imminent tasks on top and settling the rest of them according to their order of importance.

It will eventually equip you with a list of everything you need to achieve the desired task successfully. You can further chunk down the tasks into smaller units if you still find any of them too complicated in this form.

Set Measurable Milestones

Now mark each task with a measurable milestone. As you complete a task and move on to the next, you’ll feel empowered and in charge of the whole situation, also elevating your self-belief.

Even better, you can tick against the task you continue to complete on your timeline, getting your motivation level up as you progress ahead.

Tip 5: Identify and Expedite Your Peak-Productivity Slot

It may surprise you, but the optimum productivity slot differs from person to person. Some feel at the top of their game early in the morning, while it peaks in the afternoon for some others. There are also some with the tendency to hit the maximum productivity level at night.

Circadian Rhythms – Body’s Internal Clock

Of various other factors that may affect this level, your body’s Circadian rhythms play the most critical role in determining your peak performance time. You may consider them as your body’s internal clock.

Most people can determine their optimum productivity slot through trial and error. Once you identify it, you can further expedite your productivity with the help of something known as “The Pomodoro Technique”.

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a novel concept introduced by an Italian university student, Francesco Cirillo, in the early 1990s. It is considered one of the best productivity enhancement or time management methods.

Though Cirillo has penned a whole book about the Pomodoro Technique, we’ll confine our focus to the core idea of this concept. It involves dividing your time into small, manageable chunks and trying to cover as much of it as possible in that time slot. Then take a short break and repeat. Pretty simple, right?

Cirillo recommends dividing your time into blocks of 25 minutes, separated with a break of about 5 minutes in between. You earn an extended break of 15-20 minutes after completing every 4-5 Pomodoros (he refers to a single productive session of 25 minutes as one “Pomodoro”).

Alter the Durations of Your Pomodoros

As mentioned earlier, this is just the core idea of the Pomodoro Technique. Many experts advocate experimenting with the blocks of time when following this technique. Why? Because not all people have the same attention span or working style.

Some people can achieve the highest level of focus for much shorter periods. Some feel at home when they have reasonably longer time lengths at their hands. And for some others, it’s somewhere in between.

Now, you have to work out what time length works best for your own Pomodoro and determine your optimal productivity block so that you can expedite your productive hours.

Conclusion

Working out the best time management strategy for yourself is all about staying in tune with your productivity at work and your ability to acknowledge what’s working and which areas need further improvement.

Use this guide to practice time management effectively, and remember one thing. Working consistently on your time management skills is the best way to see long-term improvement in your productivity and overall performance.