Being purposeful with your day

Much advice about time management is about creating a to-do list, reminding you what you want to do. However, it's more important to use a schedule, which tells you when you're going to do it.

• Create "bookends" for each day

When you have a crammed schedule, it's tempting to think you can multitask. But studies find that focusing on a single task can be 500% more productive.

If you find it hard to focus on just one thing:

• Remove distractions,

When you start to feel this way, take a break.

• Disconnect from what you're working on.
• Give your eyes a break. After every 20-minutes of work, stare at something at least 20 feet away from you for 20 s...

When you start to schedule your tasks, you may be too optimistic about how much you can get done. You may take on too much work or get stressed when tasks take longer than you expected.

To counteract the Planning Fallacy:

• Work in a buffer into you...

To build a better time management system, you need to know what you currently spend your time on. You need to know where you're losing time to the wrong things.

To track your time, spend a few days writing a "time log" to track how you spend your day.

This means that you should do your most important work when you have the most energy and scheduling passive activities when you're more naturally low.

We all have moments in the day where we feel naturally more alert and energetic and other times where we lack energy. It is known ...

Decide what the smallest, most doable next step is. Then list all the next steps with a deadline for each.

It's easy to procrastinate when a project feels overwhelming. Part of proper goal-setting is to be able to break larger goals down into daily tasks. Focus on making p...

Goals work great to get you motivated to do your work, but they don't tell you how you're going to achieve your goals.

Ask yourself what you can do every day that will help you achieve your ultimate goal. If you need to write a 4,000 word essay by the end of t...