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3 Time Management Tips That Will Improve Your Health and Productivity
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Urgent ≠ Important
Time management can be tough. What is urgent in your life and what is important to your life are often very different things:
- going to the gym today isn't urgent, but it is important for your long–term health.
- eating real, unprocessed foods isn't required for you to stay alive right now but will reduce your risk of cancer and disease.
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Eliminate half-work at all costs
Examples of half-work:
- You start writing a report but stop randomly to check your phone for no reason or to open up Facebook or Twitter.
- You try out a new workout routine. Two days later, you read about another “new” fitness program and try a little bit of that. You make little progress in either program and so you start searching for something better.
- Your mind wanders to your email inbox while you're on the phone with someone.
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Do the most important thing first
Decisions and choices that you make throughout the day tend to drain your willpower. You're less likely to make a good decision at the end of the day than you are at the beginning.
If you do the most important thing first, then you’ll never have a day when you didn’t get something important done.
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Stick to the schedule
For example, you decide to run 3 miles in the afternoon, but during the day your schedule got crazy and now you only have 20 minutes to workout.
If you reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule, instead of running 3 miles, you run 1 mile or do five sprints or 30 jumping jacks. You get a workout in no matter what.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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What Time Management Is
Time is our precious resource. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value.
...
Eat That Frog!
Your “frog” is your most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.
If you have two important tasks, start your day with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first. Focus on completing it before you go to the next one.
Failure to execute
We tend to confuse activity with accomplishment: we attend endless meetings and make plans, but at the end of the day, no one does the job and gets the results required.
“Failure to execute” is among the biggest problems in organizations today.
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Goals provide structure to your work
... by giving you a prioritized list of things to get done.
They help you to identify your priorities, outline what you want to achieve when you want to ach...
Craig Jarrow
“By saying no, you are giving yourself the ability and bandwidth to say yes to the things that are more important.”
Matt Mayberry
“If you often find yourself run down by your daily workload or overwhelmed by the complexity of projects and tasks in your life, it is likely because you have not fully mastered effective time management.”
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We All Tend To Make The Same Mental Mistakes
Economists used to believe that people will always choose the option that maximizes their well-being. But people act against their rational self-interest all the time.
We p...
The Mere Urgency Effect
This bias addresses why we do unimportant tasks we think are time-sensitive over tasks that are not time-sensitive, even if the non-time-sensitive tasks provide greater rewards.
How to overcome this bias:
- Use the Eisenhower Matrix. It will reveal the urgent/not urgent and important/not important tasks.
- Block off on your calendar the most productive 2-4 hours each day for your most important work.
- Only answer emails at specific times. Don't allow email to bleed into other time.
- Give your important tasks a deadline and find a way to commit to it.
The Zeigarnik Effect
This effect describes our tendency to remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. Each unfinished task takes up some of your attention, splitting your focus. It also interferes with your sleep.
What you can do about it:
- Write your tasks down as soon as they come to you.
- Have a system in place for organizing and regularly reviewing your tasks.
- Have an end of work shutdown ritual, so your unfinished tasks don't stay in your mind after-hours.
- Take a small step to help you get started. The act of starting can help you keep going to the end.
- Don't forget to review your completed tasks and celebrate what you've already accomplished.