Ever felt the fear of missing out on beautiful, worthy experiences of life because you were too busy doing the same old pending tasks? Missed a party because you wanted to complete that assignment? Or missed a train because you snoozed your alarm in the morning?
Ice cream melts away if you don't eat it in time. To enjoy an ice cream, it is important to eat it in time. Similarly, to enjoy life, it is important to manage time!
Time is what we want most but what we use worst-William Penn
Life is short and time is limited. The bad news is time flies; but the good news is, you are the pilot. It is in your hand to make sure it flies in the direction that you want.
Time is precious because you cannot have it back once it is wasted. So, it is important to use your time effectively. By implementing time management principles in your day-to-day life, you can live your life to its fullest.
Going through this article, you will find a few tips to manage your time effectively.
Time management allows you to do a particular task within time and with minimum effort. Getting a task done in time can help you improve its quality. Doing things on your priority list in time will eventually reduce your stress and you can make time for doing things that you love. Time management is thus, important in both personal and professional life.
“It’s not limited time that’s the problem, its bad time management.”
Here are a few tips which can help you to manage your time better.
Following these simple techniques you can improve your time management skills:
1. Wake up early: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Set alarms. Make sure they are realistic. Waking up early can help you accomplish your morning tasks efficiently.
By waking up early, you can have a healthy start to the day. You can have that tasty breakfast meal which you were skipping earlier. Having a healthy and cheerful start to the day will keep you refreshed all day.
2. Find out where you are spending your time daily: Figure out how much time you are spending on your daily activities.
Track your daily activities and you will find what are the unnecessary things that consume your time.
As you conduct this audit, you will get a clear picture of where you need to cut down on spending your time.
3. Planning: Plan out your activities every day.
Starting your day without planning can land you up in a mess.
Make use of daily planners and to-do lists for this purpose. Prioritize your tasks.
Make use of the following categories to categorize your tasks based on their importance and urgency.
Follow the Eisenhower matrix to prioritize your tasks:
Important and urgent: These tasks have important deadlines with high urgency. You need to complete them right away
Important but not urgent: These items are important but don’t require immediate action and should involve long-term development strategizing
Urgent but not important: These are the tasks that need to get done on an urgent basis without stressing their importance
Not urgent and not important: Activities under this category do not pressurize and you can accomplish them whenever you get done tasks belonging to the above lists. You can eliminate these for a while
4. Avoid Distractions:
Do not fall prey to distractions such as text messages, games, social networking sites, surfing, and web browsing, etc.
Keep these things as refreshments when you take a break.
Bumping into unnecessary things while working on something important can reduce your efficiency. This will eventually result in wastage of time.
Take the ‘one thing at a time' approach. By doing this, you can savor everything you do.
5. File management and time limit:
1 project, 100s of files, and 1000s of documents! And your device is flooding with clutter.
Important websites, useful apps, research material, worksheets, images representing brainstormed ideas, emails with lots of attachments, and what not!
How in the world are you going to find that one file your boss asked you to produce immediately? The answer is file management.
Create folders. Subfolders. Give these, relevant names. Categorize the different types of material into different folders.
Maintain a sorting pattern. May it be through names or dates. Whatever that suits you. Clear the clutter, free up space from time to time.
6. No means NO:
Don’t hesitate to say no to take part in a less worthy activity if you are focussing on something more important.
Put your point straight but be humble. Make use of phrases such as ‘maybe later', ‘will join you in some time’, etc.
This will not compromise your relations and you will also able to manage time.
7. Track time: One better solution for time management is to track your time either manually or use tracking apps.
Various time tracking softwares are available that maintains your daily logs with time estimation.
Use timesheets for the billing process, tracking, payroll, and maintain records. Put multiple timers to switch between the start and end of the task
8. No, multitasking: Multitasking brings quantity but not quality work, so don’t do many errands that compromise quality.
Research suggests that only 2% of people can multitask effectively and the remaining 98% of people, are wasting their time doing multitasking.
9. The 80-20 rule:
The 80-20 rule of the Pareto Principle believes that 80% of results come from 20% of the effort put in. Put in 20% effort in managing your time and you can expect 80% better results.
10. Get enough sleep:
Get a minimum of 7 to 8 hours of sleep. Rest well.
Your brain works with maximum efficiency when you’ve had enough sleep.
Insufficient sleep can lead to health problems. And you definitely don’t want to spend time being sick when life has so much in store for you.
Now that we have taken a look at certain simple time management tricks, know that effective time management will lead you to:
· Improved quality of work
· Increased productivity
· Maintain work-life balance
· Earn some me-time
· Live stress-free
And bad time management will take away from you:
· Quality of work
· Happiness
· Peace of mind
· Worthy moments of life
Completing tasks before time can help you make time for yourself, your family, and your friends. With effective time management, you can better maintain your relationships.
Do things that you love. Pursue your hobbies. Work on your passions. Watch your favorite shows. Listen to music. In short, live life to its fullest. Effective time management can help you get the best out of life. And so we say, time management is life management!
So, what’s your strategy to manage time? Let us know in the comments.
For more tips on better time management visit my website www.ajinkyachopade.com
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