• Good time management requires competence in four key areas.
• Don't underestimate the toll that poor time management can take on one's career and personal relationships.
• Understanding the cause of one's poor time management can help identify the tips most likely to improve it...

A Harvard Business Review summary of the literature on time management describes three components of the good time manager:

The Short-Time Guessing Game: Set the timer for two minutes. Check it when you think it’s been 30 seconds and again at 90 seconds. Repeat that until you can always get fairly close.

The Longer-Time Guessing Game: For your next few activities, write your estimate of how lo...

The Short-Time Guessing Game: Set the timer for two minutes. Check it when you think it’s been 30 seconds and again at 90 seconds. Repeat that until you can always get fairly close.

The Longer-Time Guessing Game: For your next few activities, write your estimate of how lo...

Some of my clients have adopted my system for keeping track of to-dos. My time-sensitive to-dos (for example, client appointments) go in my week-at-a-glance calendar. Anything I want to do in the next day or two but needn’t be done at a specific time goes on a 3x3 memo cube. Both sit on my desk, ...

Often, we become aware of a task that’s a higher priority than the task we’re doing. Too often, we reflexively decide to defer the higher-priority task because we want closure on the task we’re working on. Or we defer the more important task because the current one is more pleasurable. O...

Time-management problems might derive from insufficient respect for the victims of their poor time management.

Most people don’t intentionally disrespect their victims. Usually, they just haven’t written it on their to-do list or don’t check the list often enough. Or they enjoy trying to c...