TIME MANAGEMENT
Have you ever noticed that people who have nothing to do usually want to spend their time with you?
Poet Carl Sandburg said, “Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.”
Your greatest possession is the twenty-four hours you have directly ahead of you. How will you spend it? Will you give in to pressure or focus on priorities? Will you allow pointless emails, unimportant tasks, telemarketers, interruptions, and other distractions to consume your day? Or will you take complete responsibility for how you spend your time, take control of the things you can, and make today yours? If you don’t decide how your day will be spent, someone else will. – A Little piece from Make today count by John C. Maxwell
The only thing everybody in the world has in common no matter your status is “TIME”. Yes, the same 24 hours a day. Although this might not come as a surprise, it’s worth remembering once in a while.
Do you always feel short of time? Are you constantly pressured to meet deadlines? If so, you need some essential time management tips. But before we continue, I would love to tell you something interesting. Management of time doesn’t exist. What I mean by this is that time simply passes. You can’t stop it, change it or make it bend according to your wishes. What you can do to manage your time is to manage yourself and the way you approach everything you do.
That being said, here’s how to work smarter and not harder.
- Declutter your workspace; the first step to managing your time is having an organized workspace. If your workspace has papers, files, and the likes scattered around, you’re bound to waste time searching for documents. Managing your time successfully and boosting your productivity start by decluttering your workspace and only keeping important items around.
- Set goals and rewards; setting goals is crucial for planning your day. By setting achievable goals, you won’t fall off your schedule and it’s also a great way to stay motivated.
If you have an arduous task, it’s apparent that you won’t achieve them all in one day. Therefore, be realistic when creating a list so that you don’t get disappointed when you realize when 7 pm rolls around.
- Schedule your day ahead of time; do you have any idea what you’re going to do the second you wake up? Or are you still unsure about what you’re going to do for the day?
Waking up in the morning without knowing what you have to do during the day can make you either forget important tasks or take on more responsibilities than you can manage.
To become more effective, you can make a plan the night before you go to bed. Take 30 mins before sleep to organize the next day’s schedule. This will help you manage your time effectively as you would be organized.
If you can’t make a plan before you sleep, you can do it first thing in the morning.
- Prioritize your task; sometimes it’s futile to try to do every single thing in the day as time might not be on our side. That’s why it’s important to set your priorities right.
To manage your priorities effectively, you could start by dividing them into the following categories.
- Important and urgent tasks; refers to important tasks that need to be done right away.
- Important but not urgent; this refers to a task that appears important and can be done at anytime you want but not before the first category.
- Urgent but not important; this refers to the task that needs to be done immediately but when completed, it does not have any lasting value.
- Not important and not urgent; this refers to a task that is leisure activities or things you don’t need/want to do.
How to live your life according to your priorities.
- Evaluate priorities daily
- Plan your time carefully
- Follow your plan
- Delegate whenever possible
- Start with small tweaks in your schedule; you don’t need to change everything in your life at once to manage your time effectively. The best thing to do is to make minor adjustments or changes. Something like waking up 15 mins earlier in the morning and cutting down 30 mins of mindlessly scrolling through social media will give you a whole 45mins to do productive things. You don’t need to overwhelm yourself with something huge as you try to overhaul your life.
If you try to make changes at once, you’ll be more likely to give up and return to your original bad habits. Making slight changes will add up over time and allow you to make more significant changes over time.
- Set clear deadlines; how much time do you have to complete that task or assignment?
Setting clear deadlines is like communicating with yourself. You need to know how much time you have to finish a task and make sure it happens within that time. If you don’t know this, it would be hard for you to keep track of time.
It’s easier to be on time and do everything when it should be done, but if you set a time limit for each task it will be easier for you to complete it and keep track of them.
- Say “ NO” to multitasking; many people think that multitasking is an exceptional skill to have, but it’s not and it doesn’t save time. On the contrary, multitasking will make you complete a task with inferior quality and slow you down. You might also miss out on important details and make mistakes.
When you multitask, your attention is divided between two or more tasks, which makes your brain switch fast between them instead of focusing on just one task. Multitasking can reduce your ability to think creatively because it takes up a lot of your temporary brain storage.
CONCLUSION
Time management is a skill you need to learn and if you don’t have it, life can be much harder. Work would feel overwhelming and you might feel like you’ve wasted your day.
Even if we have all the time in this world, the outcome may differ for each person. Some people are more effective and gain more success because they can manage their time.
Let us know in the comment section which tips you think can help your time management or do you have your tips? Share it with us