How to Manage Your Time Effectively and Be Productive?

 

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Time Management is becoming a huge deal in our daily fast-paced lives. With so much to do, and a limited time to do it, we often find ourselves bombarded by a huge list of activities. Sorting through them and getting work done is no easy task as there are hundreds of distractions that will take away our focus.

 

Time Management is the process of managing your time schedule so you give the right amount of time to every activity. Time management is not just about doing work quickly, but also that time management is necessary for getting your leisure and resting time. Otherwise, it has become all too common to see people burned out from their work.

 

Thus proper time management allows you to be efficient in your daily tasks, get enough rest, focus on your social life, and maintain your mental wellness. All in all, it makes you a happier and healthier person.

 

In this article, we are going to talk about 8 amazing tips that can help you manage your time effectively without any wastage or laziness!

1. Audit Your Time

The first step in managing your time is to see how long it takes for you to do your tasks. We often end up over or underestimating our abilities. This looks like thinking you can complete something in 1 hour but actually taking 2 hours. Time auditing is simple. Sit with a timer and record how long it takes for you to complete routine tasks. Once you are done recording, you should analyze what tasks take the most amount of time. This audit then helps you in making a schedule and prioritizing goals.

2. Prioritize Set Goals

Time management isn't a problem of efficiency but rather of allocation. With the limited time that we have, it is obvious that we cannot give equal attention to everything. This is where prioritizing is important. You need to first sit down and decide what goals you want to attain. This can be many different things. And after setting those goals you have to decide what is more important. Let's say that you would rather spend time studying for competitive exams than focus on physical training. This will then allow you to prioritize your studies as more important and give them the deserved time.

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3. Make A Schedule

Now that you finally have your priorities sorted, you can start creating the schedule that you will follow. Scheduling is important. It creates a discipline in you to follow it. Secondly, the proper allocation of time ensures that you are able to do the right work at the right moment. Schedules have to accommodate everything you need to get done, and thus, need to be holistic. Needless to say, a time audit is crucial to create an effective schedule, otherwise, you may often find yourself not being able to stick to it.

4. The Swiss Cheese Method

The Swiss Cheese Method is a very simple process. It was created by Alan Lakein, and is a method of task management. The premise is very simple. Whenever you have a large work or task to do, it is often highly beneficial to break it down into bite-sized steps. Completing small tasks in 15 to 20 minutes creates a strong sense of a forward-momentum and makes you feel that you are actually getting work done. Otherwise, simply out of the volume of work, if you think about how much you have left, you'll feel stressed. Thus, the Swiss Cheese Method makes big objectives less scary and easier to complete on time.

5. Take Frequent Breaks

All work and no rest will dull your ability to perform. Frequent but small breaks help you catch your breath in-between moments. Firstly, it can help you settle and reorient yourselves. Second, now that we spend so much time on our work and other activities, a short break is a great way to let off some stress. Lastly, even beyond the mental aspect, working hard is also physically tiring. The break can let you grab a quick bite to eat, drink water, or just let yourself rest a little.

6. Do Not Procrastinate

The biggest enemy of time management is procrastination and laziness. A lazy attitude towards life makes you procrastinate, or keep pushing work for later. This means overextending your breaks and not doing something up until the last minute. Sure, many people are able to work extremely hard during crunch time, but that isn't really beneficial when you can be much more stress-free simply by spreading out the work and doing it in a timely manner. You won't have to be constantly worried about impending deadlines, or have to then block all sorts of rest, leisure, and other activities to get something done at the eleventh hour. Keep your goals in mind and stick to your schedule, otherwise, procrastination can be really dangerous in destroying all your time management processes.

7. Block Out the Noise

We are bombarded by so much harmful environmental noise. This isn't just restricted to the noise that we hear but also everything in general that distracts us. This can be looking at your phone constantly to reply to messages, being disturbed by an ongoing construction or simply getting distracted elsewhere. You can buy earplugs or use many notification-suppressing apps to block out the noise that distracts you and eats away your attention span. We can often end up spending hours on meaningless distractions that would have otherwise been useful and productive.

8. Make It A Habit

All the time management tips we have mentioned aren't simply one-time actions that you can do for a few days and then magically solve all your issues. Time management is a continuous process and you will only progress when you make it a central element of your lifestyle.

 

Using these tips, you can approach your daily schedule with a whole new and fresh perspective, and transform your lives with healthy time management!