Time management is not something that only affects managers and business owners; time wastage is a problem that is affecting everyone, including the students, job seekers and stay at home mothers.
To manage your time effectively, you first need to review how you use your time. If you feel the desire to be more organised in life or to be more productive, you are probably not managing your time well. Below are some hints and tips that can help you manage your time in a better way.
These are the some hints and tips that can help you manage your time in a better way.
1. Get to Know Where You’re Wasting Time
Now that you have decided to manage your time better, you first need to ascertain where you are wasting it. For instance, you could be spending too much time surfing the internet, making personal calls or playing video games. You will need to track your daily activities for a few days. Understanding your time wastage will help you make realistic time management goals.
2. Come up with Actual Time Management Goals
Learning how to use your time effectively means you will need to change your behaviour, rather than changing the time. Now that you know what you wasting time with, you should work towards eliminating these activities from your daily schedule. Again, you have to set time management goals for the hours in a week.
For instance, you may decide not to be picking personal calls while working or studying.
When planning your time, you need to list all the tasks you need to accomplish within a certain period, such as in a day. Having a clear understanding of the tasks you need to accomplish within a certain period will help you set time management goals that are more realistic.
3. Prioritise and Categorise Your Tasks
Before leaving the house in the morning, you should prioritise your daily tasks and set your daily performance benchmark. To do this, you first need to come up with a to-do list for the day.
You should then proceed to number the items on your list according to how important or urgent they are. You may as well set a time frame for each of the activities on your list. For instance, you may be having 20 items in your mind.
Is it possible to accomplish all the 20 in the available time frame? This is why you need to prioritise the tasks and allot each a specific time frame, within which it should be accomplished.
4. Avoid Procrastination
Normally, there are those activities that you do not fancy doing, but have to do. Procrastinating to carry out these tasks can frustrate your time management efforts. You need to incorporate these tasks into your daily schedule and allot them enough time, ignoring them won’t make them go away.
While some people view time management as a burden, it is actually the little things that you have to do to make you more time conscious and productive.