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Time Management Is About More Than Life Hacks
Prerequisites for Effective Time Management
Trying to apply time management tools without having prerequisite time management skills is unlikely to work effectively. The prerequisites are:
- Awareness about time being a limited resource.
- Arrangement and designing of goals, plans, schedules, and tasks for maximum time-efficiency.
- Adaptation in your use of time, including adjustments and improvisation.
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Key Ideas
Prerequisites for Effective Time Management
Trying to apply time management tools without having prerequisite time management skills is unlikely to work effectively. The prerequisites are:
- Awareness about time being a limited resource.
- Arrangement and designing of goals, plans, schedules, and tasks for maximum time-efficiency.
- Adaptation in your use of time, including adjustments and improvisation.
Steps To Improve Time Management
The way to improve your Time Management skills requires us to figure out where to focus. This can be done by:
- Getting an objective self-assessment done by your peers or boss, or establishing a baseline behavior to measure your performance against.
- Understanding that it is your skills, not your personality or preferences that can be developed to provide the best results.
- Identifying the key skill(s) that you need to prioritize, and avoiding spreading yourself too thin.
Developing Awareness Skills
The key factor to consider when developing awareness skills is that effectiveness (doing things well) is as important as efficiency (doing things fast).
- Find which time of the day is your 'peak performance time.
- Treat time as money, a limited resource, and create a 'time budget' for your to-do list.
- Measure and evaluate the projected time vs the actual time taken.
- Consider which of the tasks create follow-up tasks that take up your time later.
- Take into consideration the 'opportunity cost' of spending time in an activity.
Developing Arrangement Skills
Developing your arrangement skills isn't about managing your work, but about managing your life, taking control of it and structuring/arranging the work accordingly.
- Prioritize your activities and obligations instead of simply making a list.
- Learn to distinguish between urgent tasks, which may not be important, and important tasks that are significant and have real value.
- Use a calendar app to plan out tasks and appointments, while making sure you have uninterrupted time for yourself.
- Make realistic estimates of time allotted for completion of a task.
- Break down a large goal into small goals if needed.
Developing Adaptation Skills
Adaptation skills are tested/developed in high-pressure or challenging situations while maintaining one's calm.
- Tie your time management behavior to your already established habits.
- Short bursts of effort work best for overwhelming tasks and they also help avoid procrastination.
- Track your time and to-do list with an App, and provide a detailed description in the reminder for important tasks, ensuring your future self doesn't ignore them.
- Avoid social media and minimize all notifications during critical work time.
- Create a contingency plan while you envision possible outcomes of the ongoing plan.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Failing to Keep a To-Do List
The trick with using To-Do Lists effectively lies in prioritizing the tasks on your list. Many people use an A – F coding system (A for high priority items, F for very low priorities).
Not Setting Personal Goals
Goals give you a destination and a vision to work toward. When you know where you want to go, you can manage your priorities, time, and resources to get there. Goals also help you decide what's worth spending your time on, and what's just a distraction.
Not Prioritizing
It's essential to learn how to prioritize tasks effectively if you want to manage your time better.
Determine if a task is high-yield and high-priority, or low-value, "fill in" work. You'll manage your time much better during the day if you know the difference.
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“Time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life de..."
Brian Tracy
Work Around Your Energy Levels
Productivity is directly related to your energy level.
Find your most productive hours — the time of your peak energy — and schedule Deep Work for those periods. Do low-value and low-energy tasks (also known as shallow work), such as responding to emails or unimportant meetings, in between those hours.
Plan Your Day the Night Before
Before going to bed, spend 5 minutes writing your to-do list for the next day. These tasks should help you move towards your professional and personal goals.
You’ll be better prepared mentally for the challenges ahead before waking up and there won’t be any room for procrastination in the morning. As a result, you’ll work faster and smoother than ever before.
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The Wild Procrastinator
You are indecisive and often deals with things in the nick of time. But procrastination has a physical and social toll as your body and your coworkers get stressed over it.
Solution...
The Perfectionist
You are obsessed with your idea of perfection and end up spending way too much time on a specific task. This leads to feelings of being overwhelmed, missed deadlines and delaying other priorities.
Solution: Make sure you have achievable standards that don’t get in the way. Train yourself to do things that fall short of your idea of perfection until you begin to accept that the “imperfect” but functional is enough for most things.
The Underestimator
You often miscalculate how long it will take to do something to the point of missing deadlines and having to reschedule.
Solution: Schedule more time than you expect to take to finish a task, learn how to work faster and to estimate time more accurately. Reviewing past assignments duration will give you good time estimates for future reference.
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