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Personal Development Tips | Time Management Tips

Time Management Tips for Busy Professionals

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There is nothing more important than time management for anyone who desires to be successful in life.

No matter how talented, skilled or hard working you are, if you do not manage your time the way you should, you will never achieve the success you want in your life.

Think of a self financing student who is studying in an engineering university and working as a freelance content writer,  if he does not manage his time properly there is a high chance he fail in exams and if he fails to take caution, he might also lose his clients. Hence, the need to manage time effectively.

While some people might find it easier to manage Time, others like busy professionals might find it a little bit difficult. This is evident in how these professionals sometimes get so much busy in their professional life that they often forget their family. This happens because they don’t know how to keep the balance between the two.

TIME MANAGEMENT:

Time management is the process you go through to organize your daily life schedule in such a way that each and every single task or activity of your day gets accomplishment in a smooth way. In other words, time management is an organized way of spending your day with full satisfaction. When you are managing your time properly, your stress levels go down & you complete the most important tasks of the day.

BENEFITS OF TIME MANAGEMENT:

The benefits of proper time management are numerous but we will touch on a few that might be of interest to you here:

1. Decreases Stress Levels:

If you are managing your time properly this will easily save you the trap of living in constant stress and depression. When your most important work gets done on time, and you have time allocated for other areas of priority to you.

2. A Healthy Life:

When your stress levels are low and you are not getting easily worked up your chances of staying healthy are increased.

3. Success in Professional Life:

We have already mentioned this in first section. The only key to success is time management. If you are an employee in an office and your time management skills are really good then you will get promotions sooner than later.

4. Time For Social Life:

When people don’t manage their time, they become the victim of an entrapping work life. If you are not completing your tasks on time then you will never be able to spend quality time with your family and loved ones as you might be always distracted.

 

SOME TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS FOR BUSY PROFESSIONALS

Are you worried that you will lose your job because you are not able to manage your time effectively? Enough of worrying because you are in the right place. Here are a few tips to help you manage your time effectively;

1. Know Your Current Schedule:

If you don’t know what you are doing right now, you can never effectively manage your schedule.

Think of your current daily schedule.

Separate the productive activities and unproductive activities and prioritize them accordingly. Follow these steps to know your current schedule:

I. Get a paper and pen
II. Make two columns
III. One for productive activities and other for unproductive activities
IV. Compare the two

2. Make a Task List:

Once you know your current schedule, know it is time to make a new one. Get another paper and start writing your most important tasks of the day. Write each and every important thing you need to do on that day. Once you have your most important tasks nailed, move to the next step.

3. Delegate:

When your task list is ready, separate the tasks you love to do the most from other tasks. If you are good in certain tasks and can complete that task with less time, you might just do them yourself and outsource or assign the other tasks on your list to other people.

4. Start from The Most Important Tasks:

You have a task list and you have already identified the tasks you are most skilled in. Now start working on them.  Work in such a way that your first task should be the one which is the most important task of the day and last task should be the one which is least important. In this way your time will really be organized.

5. Take Breaks:

Time management does not mean you make yourself a robot. You are human. Take occasional breaks. Like after working for every two to three hours, take break for at least thirty minutes. These breaks will give your mind some rest and your brain will work more efficiently.

On a final note…

Time management is really the only way to live your best life. If you know how to spend your day productively then you can easily achieve your highest potential.

While this article has shared some tips you can use quickly, here is a very amazing resource to help you make the most of your time – ​The 12 Ultimate Hacks they Didn’t Teach You In School about Time Management and Productivity.

If you are a busy professional then I highly recommend this short guide for you as it goes into the details to plug in the various parts for you.

Click Here to Learn The 12 Ultimate Hacks they Didn’t Teach You In School about Time Management and Productivity.

How Can I Improve My Time Management at Work?

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As a wise man would so deliberately say, time is one of the most important factors in a man’s life. This is not false. Time is an ever-flowing quantity that doesn’t stop for anyone.

Everyone just loves procrastinating and skipping work until the last possible minute, which leads to undesirable results and overall fall in efficiency and work satisfaction.

Since time is important to everyone, here are some tips that will help you, the employee, improve your time management so you can finish your work early, and not having to rush to meet deadlines:

 

Start early to end early

This is especially true for people who get longer deadlines, but prefer to keep their work piled up until they think that they have enough time to do a certain thing under the time they think they can work in. For example, if a certain male employee ‘x’ writes content and thinks that it will take him an hour to write 1000 words, he will not start working until there is an hour left for his deadline.

A good way to improve your time management is to not have this thought that just because you can do it under a certain time period, you have to start from that time period and take all the time you can get until the deadline approaches the end to start working on that work.

Starting early will not only give you the mental peace that you can work much more slowly and smoothly, but also improve the overall quality of work because your mind won’t always have to think about meeting that deadline.

 

Make a schedule for everything

The best way to improve your overall time management at work is to make a schedule for everything you do. Schedule when you leave for work, when you reach the workplace, when you actually start working, when you take a break, how much work you do until that break, how much time you spend on the break, and how much interaction you have with your co-workers.

Scheduling is a good way to limit how much time you spend not doing anything too.

Yes, it may sound like you’re more of a corporate robot when you make a schedule and follow it, but you’ll find your professional quality of life improving by a lot when you start following a schedule.

 

Stop procrastinating!

Procrastinating is just a fancy big word for day dreaming. Basically, just stop day dreaming. Thinking about buying that big house even when you’re sitting in your office is not going to help anything, if your wallet is empty. In order to fill your wallet, you will need to work.

Go in a flow, don’t just jump to conclusions and keep thinking about those conclusions when you should be working. Yes, you can’t really control what is going on in your mind, but there are several tips and tricks that will help you stop procrastinating. Personally, the tip to “be resilient” when it comes to tackling procrastinating has helped a lot. Think “I don’t need to think about this. I need to work!” every time you feel like you’re spacing out into the void.

 

Keep social media out of your work

One of the worst distractions nowadays is Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and other social media applications that just want you to stick on the screen 24/7. A professional knows how to impart his personal social media life from professional work. This is what you should know too. Try not to use too much phone when you’re at work, keep the phone in your bag or in your pocket, until you need the phone for an emergency like an important call.
Block Facebook and other websites from your browser using extensions or just asking your office administrator to set up the block for at least your computer. Because you won’t be able to access your social media applications anymore, you will feel like you don’t have to use them as much anymore.

 

Keep a 20%-time window

A really good advice to help improve your time management is to use the 20%-time window technique. This technique is basically that you do stuff with a 20% margin for time. For example, if you can do a certain job in an hour, start around 70 minutes before the deadline. That 20% window accounts for the bathroom break or something like the computer breaking down unexpectedly. Use this technique all the time, even if you don’t want to follow the “start early” advice.

 

Leave time for the undesired

When you really think about it, the job you have is not that bad when it comes to the working hours. If you can properly implement a time table/schedule, you might be able to still get some time left even after working for the day.

This is why you should have a schedule that has everything planned out, even the unnecessities. This tip is basically a combination of the “20%-time window” and the “make a schedule for everything”.

 

Don’t think you can multitask to save time

Multitasking is basically trying to do multiple tasks at the same time. Though it may sound like a pretty neat concept on paper, we humans just aren’t made to be doing multiple complex tasks at the same time. We make a lot of mistakes, and not everyone is Leonardo Da Vinci.

Delegate enough time for a single task at a time, and do that task in the given time period. Don’t jumble everything and try to do everything all at once. This will prove to be quite a fatal blow to your entire time management and how you deal with work on a professional level.

Conclusion

Hopefully these tips will help you save all the time you need so you can have a better quality of life in the office. These tips can be applied for students still in school too, especially that 20%-time window tip. We hope you all the best so that you stop wasting time and start working!