If you have a lot of work and/or responsibilities on your shoulders, you may feel like you are short on time to finish them all. However, the trick to overcoming this difficulty lies in organizing your tasks. In the long run, this can help reduce your stress. At the same time, it can also enhance your productivity across both your personal and professional life.
However, managing time is easier said than done. To get the most out of your time and make sure that all your tasks are completed, you will need to practice, practice, and practice. This article is all about helping you understand the things you need to do to ensure that your time management skills get better. So, if you have been struggling to complete your tasks in a timely manner, read on.
What Is Time Management?
Time management is a self-explanatory term, and it has never been more important when you consider the fast-paced lives of today’s professionals. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day, of which 6 – 9 hours are spent on sleep alone. Add a further 3 – 4 hours to accommodate for your meals and commute, and you only have around 10 – 12 hours left to complete your tasks. Of course, you should also have some time on your hands for your family, friends, hobbies, and self-care, right?
You might be thinking that it’s impossible to juggle so many things within 24 hours. However, we want you to believe that it’s entirely possible, and the best part is that you don’t need to lose sleep over it.
The Importance of Time Management
The fast-paced lives that people live nowadays demand time management. Humans have constructed a complex social and professional world and in it, there’s an abundance of responsibilities, and you have to shoulder them all. Most importantly, you have to shoulder them well. If you don’t, you are likely to find it incredibly difficult to survive.
Think about it – you can’t earn a living without work. Some portion of what you earn will go toward feeding you and your family. At the same time, you also need entertainment, which can play a significant role in rejuvenating your mind. Quite simply, you can’t isolate yourself from the rest of the world. If you do, you would not be doing any favors to your mental health. Work and play – we need both to keep going.
This is where time management becomes important. By learning to adapt to time restraints of your own choosing, you would be making sure that you don’t miss out on anything. If you fail to adapt, you will experience stress. And if the stress becomes chronic, both the physiological and psychological aspects of your life will suffer.
A completely stress-free life is a dream, as stress is a natural response that we are programmed to generate. However, you can keep it under control if you work toward improving your time management skills.
Improving Time Management Skills: The most effective ways
1. Prioritize your tasks
Prioritizing tasks is all about arranging your responsibilities and executing them in an order that places the most important tasks first. You should do this by taking the following factors into consideration:
- Urgency of the task
- Importance of the task
- Procedure you need to follow to complete the task
- Estimated length of the task
- Reward
Before your day gets going, you should create a list that places the most important tasks first. At the end of the list, feel free to include tasks that are less important and/or less time-consuming to complete. Our brains are wired to function at their best after we wake up from a 6 – 8 hour nap. So, get the most stressful tasks out of the way first. This way, once you get down to the simplest tasks, you won’t feel overwhelmed.
Sure, you could do it the other way around, i.e. get the simplest tasks out of the way ahead of the complex tasks. However, over time, this can significantly increase your stress levels.
2. Don’t be afraid to delegate
If you are taking on way too many tasks, you may not be able to complete them all. Even if you do complete them, you may end up in a situation where you feel burnt out. To do away with this, consider delegating your tasks. A lot of people tend to shy away from task delegation as they think it involves shirking responsibilities, but that’s not the case.
For instance, if you’ve got too much work at home, don’t hesitate to ask your family members to chip in. And if there’s too much to tackle at work, reach out to your subordinates. Also, when you delegate responsibilities, make sure that you delegate them based on the skills of your subordinates. Task delegation ensures flexibility and efficiency, and you would be making a mistake if you ignore it.
3. Set deadlines and stick to them
When you create a list of tasks to be completed for a particular day, make sure that you also set deadlines. The deadlines should not be rigid, but they should not be too flexible either. Go for realistic deadlines. For example, if a task requires around 30 minutes to be completed, set aside 40 minutes for it. This will ensure that you complete the task and get some time to reset your mind.
In the first few days of learning time management skills, setting deadlines and meeting them may be difficult. However, it’s important that you keep up with the practice. Think of deadlines as challenges, and once you overcome them, reward yourself.
4. Swear by to-do lists
To-do lists are all about doing away with procrastination, i.e., the behavior of delaying tasks until the last minute. Also, make sure that your to-do lists are physical, i.e., they are written down in a notebook or planner. Sure, you can create a mental to-do list, but it’s rarely as effective as a physical list.
Once your to-do list for a day is created, it’s important that you stick to it. Carry your notebook or planner with you. Keep ticking off the tasks as you complete them. This can make you feel like you have achieved something big – just the motivation you need to keep going. Feel free to create different to-do lists as well. For example, one list could be all about the tasks you have to complete at home, and another could be about the tasks at your workplace.
5. Don’t let stress overwhelm you
Effective time management can have a significant impact on the levels of stress you experience in your everyday life. However, you can’t expect it to eliminate stress altogether. After all, stress is a vital part of human existence. When you experience stress, it’s important that you engage in the right practices to keep it from overwhelming you.
In today’s popular culture, self-destructive practices such as consumption of alcohol are often portrayed as effective ways to lower stress. However, if you truly want to keep your stress levels down, it’s important that you do the following:
- Spend time outside, preferably close to nature
- Exercise
- Meditate
- Talk to loved ones about your life’s stresses
- Learn and practice deep breathing
6. Make some space for fun activities to overcome procrastination
Don’t procrastinate – you’ll hear a lot of people say this. However, the fact is that procrastination can be a natural response to tasks that are mundane, monotonous, and repetitive. For example, if your to-do list has several consecutive repetitive tasks, you might end up procrastinating after finishing a couple of them.
This is where the importance of making space for fun activities comes into the picture. After every couple of repetitive tasks, you should engage in something that’s fun. For instance, some time in outdoors or simply meditating would serve as a break that allows your mind to reset. Following the break, you can get back to doing another repetitive task with more vigor.
7. Wake up early
People who wake up late tend to complain about how little time they have to complete their tasks. However, they don’t care to admit that they wake up late because they stay up late, often for unnecessary things. If you are guilty of this practice, it’s time to start waking up earlier in the day. To do this, you also have to get your act together at night.
For instance, if you have the habit of going to bed at 2 or 3 AM at night, break it by starting to turn in at around 9 – 10 PM or midnight. Initially, this may be challenging. However, if you do this, you’re likely to wake up 30 – 40 minutes before sunrise. This will help you prepare for the day ahead and also catch a glimpse of the sunrise.
8. Steer clear of multitasking
Multitasking is a new-age thing. People are often juggling multiple tasks at the same time hoping to make things more efficient. However, you need to realize that the human brain can’t function like a modern-day computer. While computers are armed with multi-core processors to undertake multiple tasks simultaneously, we can only truly focus on one thing at a time.
So, if you have been multitasking, it’s time to go back to focusing on one task, finishing it, and then moving on to a new task. Apart from making things more efficient, this will also allow you to ensure high quality of work.
9. Practice the Pomodoro Method
The human brain is often at its most effective when it has to focus on tasks in short bursts. It is this aspect of the brain that the Pomodoro Method makes the most of. Here’s how it works – whenever you start executing any task, make sure that you stick at it for 25 minutes. After those 25 minutes are done and dusted, take a 5-minute break and get back to it if the task isn’t completed.
You would be wrong to underestimate the power of a 5-minute break. It can allow your brain sometime to refocus without breaking the momentum of work. Remember to reward yourself with a longer break (15 – 20 minutes) after completing 3 – 4 consecutive tasks using the Pomodoro Method.
10. Bid goodbye to distractions and say no from time to time
Distractions tend to get the better of us and they can make work incredibly inefficient. Imagine this – you’re 100% focused on work but suddenly you get a flood of social media notifications. Naturally, you would want to know what the notifications are about, but this can break your flow of work. So, start working either by turning your phone off or switching on its silent mode. Remember, you will get the breaks during which you can check out the notifications.
Also, it’s important that you say no to extra workload when you already have a lot on your shoulders. While human beings are capable of doing a lot of work, it’s not exactly healthy to take on extra work when you already have a ton it pending.
Conclusion
So, there you have it – 10 of the most effective ways to perfect your time management skills. Putting all of these methods into practice in one go might be difficult. So take it to step by step, and you’re sure to become a master at managing your time and your work.
Read this if you are short on time to go through the entire article.
Time management refers to the practice of arranging and executing tasks in a way that makes things efficient and less stressful.
- 1. Prioritize your tasks
- 2. Don’t be afraid to delegate
- 3. Set deadlines and stick to them
- 4. Swear by to-do lists
- 5. Don’t let stress overwhelm you
- 6. Make some space for fun activities to overcome procrastination
- 7. Wake up early
- 8. Steer clear of multitasking
- 9. Practice the Pomodoro method
- 10. Bid goodbye to distractions and say no from time to time
Last Updated on March 6, 2023 by Safiya K
