Do you manage your time wisely or do you struggle with deadlines? In today’s competitive and fast-paced world where your ‘to-do list’ extends long, it is important to work smarter rather than harder, in order to get your tasks done in a more efficient way. However, the question is – how can you complete all your tasks or accomplish many activities in the given time. The answer lies in time management! Here are some tips that can be helpful.
Understand your environment:
The environment in time management majorly refers to people, places and activities that affect your time. A better understanding of the environmental factors ensures better control to complete the given tasks.
Understand your body clock:
The science of chronobiology that studies how body systems relate to time, suggests that different people are productive during different times of the day. Our biological systems impact our energy and attention levels, thus influencing our activity schedule. It is helpful to prioritize the most critical activities during our most productive and active hours of the day.
Create a ‘to-do’ list & prioritize your activities:
Generate a list of tasks that you confront on a daily or near-daily basis. Prepare a separate master list of activities that are critical. Segregating the activities will help to realize your critical and non-critical activities, and you can thus allocate time accordingly and wisely.
Clustering similar activities:
Tasks that have something in common or activities of similar nature can be grouped together into a cluster. Such tasks usually require less time and effort. This helps in quick ticks on the ‘to-do list’ as well as make the activity more compact, efficient, and fruitful.
Set realistic achievable targets:
Analyze your time allocation for critical time-consuming activities. Lengthy activities are efficiently completed if they are split into small achievable targets. Once the realistic small targets are achieved, pat or reward yourself. This builds excitement and rigor to meticulously complete the remaining activity.
Figure out where your time gets wasted:
It is recommended to run an honest time audit or appraisal for activities that you feel consume more time than required. A realistic assessment of your activity pattern will help you identify areas of improvement to quickly complete the activities that are otherwise taking longer than expected time.
Eliminate distractions:
Distractions make it nearly impossible for us to focus, tempting us to procrastinate, causing reduced productivity and involvement in the activity. The most common diversions are digital distractions which are just a click away. We tend to waste our time and energy on unimportant information and leave little scope for finishing the task on time. To avoid distractions, it is advisable to set up a shorter time frame to complete the task or establish artificial preponed deadlines, leaving some buffer time to complete the task in case there is a distraction.
Avoid procrastinating. It’s supposed to be the thief of time:
At times, the nature of given activities is not appealing, or the task flow may be unclear to us. This can cause unnecessary delay in completing the activity, with the fear of culminating into a vicious cycle of habit or behaviour. It can produce negative effects on regular work and cause frustration, demotivation, and anxiety. In serious cases, it can cause low self-esteem and depression. The best strategy is to stay organized and focus to get the work done.
Say ‘no’ when and where necessary:
Be selective to commit to activities where you have a choice. It is not important or necessary to commit to any activity that comes your way. If given a choice, try to gauge whether that activity is important for you or not. If you are aware and confident of any other less time-consuming way to produce the same results or outcome, you can diplomatically ‘say no’ as it may work best for you.
Plug the time leaks:
>Identify the nature of your non-critical activities and time eventually spent on executing those activities. Conducting an audit of non-critical tasks will help evade the ones which are genuinely not relevant and non-purposive.
Learn to anticipate:
It is important to keep abreast with the changing times and have knowledge of forthcoming activities and events within your environment. If you are able to predict the upcoming tasks well, it will give you enough scope to plan them well in advance and complete them as per the set timelines.
Notice your time management style and improvise it!
There is no fundamental rule that ‘one style fits all. As far as your style helps you to accomplish tasks efficiently, it is the best one. If you can adopt the suggestive ideas listed above, you can transform some elements of your style and fine-tune your approach.
To be productive is not a talent, it is indeed a skill that is possible for every individual to develop. These tips and tricks for better time management can help you to organize yourself efficiently, by improving your productivity and performance, eventually achieving your goals.
Interestingly, technology offers us solutions through software and apps, to help to increase productivity. There are some useful time management apps, distraction blocking apps, to-do list apps, that generally help to organize and manage time wisely.