Improve Your Productivity With These 8 Practical Time Management Tips 

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Improve Your Productivity With These 8 Practical Time Management Tips

You must have come across the term- “all-rounder.” There are some great minds who can manage most of the tasks, if not every very well. But if you find yourself lacking in making enough time for all the necessary as well as healthy activities, this article is for you.

Time management really seems like a biting a bullet kind of task, right? In our daily life, we have to get the perfect balance between our personal life, work-life, and social life. Nonetheless, striking that perfect poise isn’t always easy despite all our efforts.

But fretting over this every now and then will only steal away more of your time certainly. Solution? While you can’t expect things to change overnight for sure, you can at least try to practice the art of time management optimistically, sincerely, and gradually. So let’s dive in and see what good these time management tips can do for you.

8 PRACTICAL TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS

Whether you’re a home-maker, student, or professional, time management is an inevitable part of your life. If you can’t manage your responsibilities efficiently, you won’t be able to get satisfactory results. A task needs to be done efficiently, mere completion isn’t just an option for those who seek productivity. So here are 8 practical time management tips that will assist you in hitting the fish’s eye.

Observe How You Mostly Spend Your Day

This time management tip will serve as a foundation for your further time management planning. You must do it in order to be fully open-eyed about where exactly you’re spending your time. This will help you analyze how productively you’re employing your time and how much time you spend on gaming and social media platforms. This way, you’ll be able to get the answer to the 3 below-stated questions for yourself:

  • How much time do you take to do a certain activity?
  • At what point in time are you most likely to perform a task with utmost concentration?
  • At what point in time do you usually feel like taking a break?

Usually, we overlook the importance of being familiar with our own self, but as least relevant as it seems, it is essential to figure out where you can adapt yourself. So try this tip and see for yourself where you can make up for your lost time. You can also take the help of tools such as RescueTime and Toggl Track.

Put Together A To-Do-List

The self-assessment that you just read about in the point mentioned above will be of assistance in setting out goals that you need to achieve in a day. When we talk of goals, sometimes human psychology might make people over-expect from themselves. But you must be clear that your goals have to be realistic. Otherwise, no matter how much effort you put in, you’ll be nothing but devastated.

Improve Your Productivity With These 8 Practical Time Management Tips

You can construct a to-do planner or list for a week or a day (that depends upon you and the nature of the work you do). Break down the goals into small tasks and construct a proper list of what needs to be done, and most importantly, act upon it. Make a little effort and see for yourself how good it actually feels when you accomplish those tasks and cross them off the list.

Prioritize Your Tasks As Per Eisenhower Matrix

Once done with identifying your goals, it’s time to prioritize them. It is one of the key time management tips. The Eisenhower Matrix will be very helpful whenever you need to decide on a task’s priority. The 4 Ds (Do, Defer, Delegate, and Delete) would make you acknowledge a task better depending on its nature or the category they fall into.

Improve Your Productivity With These 8 Practical Time Management Tips

The above diagram explains how you should go for prioritizing your tasks based on the category they fall into. As per this matrix, one should completely expunge out the things which fall in the ‘neither urgent nor important’ category, quickly start working on ‘important and urgent’ tasks and assign tasks that fall in the ‘urgent but not important’ quadrant to others as they don’t need much of your attention and schedule ‘important but not urgent’ tasks for some time later.

Prioritizing activities this way, you will hit two birds with one stone. Firstly, it’ll reduce the load, and secondly, it’ll help you focus better on crucial areas.

Think Before Multitasking

Here’s another time management tip- think before you multitask. Yes, you read that right. There is no denying that multitasking seems quite a skill, but the fact that it’s hard for some people can also not be overlooked. In fact, it is just that we all differ in very aspects of life, one of them being capabilities. It’s quite a possibility that a person can glide through two or three activities or tasks in a fell swoop. In contrast, another person might face difficulty in doing so, nevertheless can handle some different tasks without any hefts.

That’s why you must analyze your potential and work accordingly. Moreover, dealing with one thing before proceeding with the other assures high-grade quality work.

Allot Time Limits To Tasks & Use The Pomodoro Technique

Allotting a time frame to tasks is one of the primitive time management tips which can boost your productivity to a noteworthy extent. This is also regarded as timeboxing tasks so as to avoid spending more than the required time on a particular task.

For this, you first need to deduce the actual time needed to finish a particular task. The very first time management tip mentioned in this article will help you bury this hatchet of reckoning how much time you need to finish a particular task (not to mention while maintaining quality standards). Sometimes, you might get some other work in between the tasks you’re equipped with, so you should analyze the workflow and increase or decrease the allotted time accordingly.

Improve Your Productivity With These 8 Practical Time Management Tips

The Pomodoro technique suggests breaking the time zone into 25-5-25. This means work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break, and again get back to work for 25 minutes. After repeating this four times, you can take a break of 15-20 minutes. It sounds a little tough initially, but many studies have found this technique effective in escalating productivity and work efficiency.

Cut On Distractions

This is one of those time management tips that we often hear but follow rarely. No doubt, it’s going to be hard, but why not give it a shot. Start with baby steps and gradually make it a habit to not let your Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat notifications stand in the way of your work every now and then. It not only hinders your work but also breaks the flow.

Cherish Your Breaks

If you wish to hold onto your productivity and creativity for longer, then make sure to take breaks in between your work and use them for the better. That way, you won’t exhaust yourself beyond the line. And yes, instead of scrolling over social media posts, equip yourself with something that energizes you and enlightens your mood like meditation, cooking, reading, doodling, yoga, crafting, drawing, gardening, etc. Learn to cherish the breaks rather than just having them.

Put Your Plan Into Action

Last but not least is to act upon the plan. It often happens that we end up thinking a lot about stuff that needs to be done, we even make to-do planners but are too lazy to act upon them. This procrastination not just makes us fall behind our deadlines but also imprints a negative self-image in our minds which demotivates us and leaves us with self-doubts regarding being efficient.

The concept of time management is more of a soft skill that can be developed with practice, to be more precise, constant practice. You need to have it in your routine. Believe it or not, if you’re determined about it, your hard work will surely pay off. After all, the universe listens to the intent of your efforts. So all the best, and forget not to share how the above-mentioned time management tips eased your stress.