Time. The one resource you can’t get any more of, no matter who you are, where you live, or how much money you have. What you can do is work on making use of your time wisely and effectively to achieve your goals (professional and personal).
Effective time management is important to your success in life. But, no time management strategy is right for every person. Instead, it’s up to each of us to identify our priorities and then adapt our schedule to hopefully devote the right amount of time to each part of our lives.
Let’s look at a few fairly universal tips to help you improve your time management skills. A couple of things to remember. It isn’t necessary to maximize every minute of productivity in your daily life. Effective time management isn’t necessarily about squeezing every bit of productivity out of each waking minute. Instead, these tips can help you focus on finishing the most important tasks and not letting them get overshadowed by less important, but seemingly more timely items.
Personal vs. Professional Time
One important tip for just about anyone is to set some boundaries between your job and personal time. You may do this by defining a set work schedule (like 8am to 5pm) or if your work schedule is more fluid, by ensuring that each day includes enough time for personal activities. It’s funny that people who have flexible work schedules and hours that aren’t quite as set often find themselves working even more than people who need to be in the office a set number of hours each day.
This limit setting is even more important with so many people working from home. The work-life balance becomes much more complicated when you are doing both things from the same location. For as many benefits of working from home provides, you have to be disciplined and ensure you are spending adequate time at work and at home, even if you don’t really change physical locations.
Focus on Stress Reduction.
Why is stress reduction a tactic to improve time management? Because being overly stressed makes all of us less productive. That lack of productivity then leads to more stress, feeding the cycle endlessly.
This is one of those cases where trying to jam too much into your schedule becomes entirely counter-productive. Overscheduling may seem like a great way to get more done, but in reality, it just creates stress when you start missing deadlines or don’t achieve your daily goals.
You can address stress in a variety of ways, but one quick tip includes setting realistic goals for yourself (personal and professional). While it’s good to push yourself out of your comfort zone, if you push too far, the backlash will not help you become more productive, happier, or really anything positive.
Set Prioritized Goals
One big aspect of time management is having a set of goals your trying to achieve. Goals can be big or small, complex or simple. But, the idea is to create a list of goals that you want to achieve.
Next, you need to develop a timeline for achieving your goals, and that typically starts with prioritization. Which goals are most important to achieve? In work, you likely have a supervisor who has input, if not fairly substantial oversight, of your project list. Still, you should work with him or her to identify which projects and goals are the most important.
Finally, set timelines for those goals and projects. This will involve using your priority list, but also incorporating how long it takes to get things done or when they are due. You will likely have goals that are time sensitive, even if they aren’t as important as other goals. You may choose to prioritize a time-sensitive goal of lesser overall importance, because it needs to be done today, versus a bigger project that isn’t due for some time.
Break up Large Tasks into Subtasks.
We all have plenty of big projects at work and home. You might have a large goal at work of preparing for a big conference, which involves arranging travel, organizing exhibit space, preparing a sales presentation, and any number of other tasks. That’s a lot to swallow.
So, a great tactic is to break up those larger, complex projects into identifiable sub-tasks that are all steps toward achieving the big goal. A benefit of breaking up the tasks is that it gives you a much better idea of the time commitment required to complete the larger goal. It can also give you a place to start on a big project, where just looking at the end goal doesn’t really give you much to go on with regard to getting started.
