Effective time management is the secret to being able to hit your goals, achieve a work life balance and avoid that slightly flat feeling at the end of the day when your To Do list hasn’t reduced at all in size. It can be the difference between feeling like you’re living an empowered and proactive life or living with the sense that life is just happening to you and you have little control. Learning to manage your time effectively can be life changing - these are some of the simplest ways to do it.
● Audit how you spend your time right now. Track your daily activities for a week so you can see where you’re spending your time right now. Look out for the ways that you waste time and get a sense of how much you can realistically accomplish in a day, as well as the activities that provide you with the greatest return on effort.
● Get organised. It’s impossible to manage your time more effectively unless you organise your time. That could be a To Do list that you check at the start and end of every day or it might be a detailed schedule that you gradually work your way through. Keeping this kind of record can also help to minimise stress, as you’ll know exactly what you’re leaving unfinished at the end of the day and what you need to do as soon as you start in the morning.
● Learn how to prioritise. Effective use of time means spending the most time on the highest priorities. Start by looking at tasks that actually shouldn’t be on your plate at all and delegating them. Organise your To Do list or schedule based on the importance of the tasks, as opposed to their urgency, so that you’re prioritising your effort where it counts.
● Do similar tasks at the same time. It’s a very efficient use of time to block out chunks of your day to do a number of similar tasks in one go. That might be an hour in the morning for all your emails or returning phone messages, for example. This is a much more effective way to operate than continuously jumping between tasks throughout the day.
● Don’t multitask. It just doesn’t work - in fact it can make all your tasks take longer. Focus on one thing at a time, complete it and then move on to the next.
● Give every task a time limit. We will usually take up whatever time is available to complete a specific task - if you don’t set a time limit this can mean everything takes a lot longer. Timeboxing is a great technique that allows you to allocate a time limit to specific tasks so that you don’t spend longer on anything than you should.
● Start learning to say no. It’s almost impossible to manage your time more effectively if you’re always helping out others who can’t manage theirs. Key to this is learning how to say no to others’ requests, delegation or unreasonable demands.
It’s not difficult to be more efficient with your time when you follow these simple steps. Find out more by booking on to our Masterclass in Managing your Time More Effectively Training Course.