Time-Management Tips to Boost Productivity.

We’re all familiar with the age-old dilemma of how to best manage our time. Time management is a valuable skill, especially for high achievers, because if you don’t manage your time then your time manages you. For those of you who feel that time management is an enticing but elusive practice this blog will break down simple but effective ways of managing your time that you can begin to enact immediately.

Where is your time going?

First things first though, we can’t effectively manage our time if we don’t know where the time is being spent. To solve this problem I recommend a practice I call a time audit. Simply put a time audit is the practice of monitoring how and where you spend your time over a set duration. For example, you could conduct a time audit for as little as a week or as long as a month to help you gather data points.

Not only does the time audit show you where you’re spending time but it also highlights areas where you may be spending too little time. With this data, you’re now equipped to make an intentional plan of how and where you spend your time so you can be effective and make an impact. From this place of understanding you can effectively manage your time utilizing some of the techniques below: 

Lists

Lists are one of the most basic time-management tools that generally cost nothing to implement. Lists can be conducted in a variety of ways such as a running list of to-do items, identifying the top 5 most important tasks of the day and listing them in order of importance, as well as creating categorical lists for different domains of your work/life. One common pitfall with the list system is inundating yourself with too many to-do items creating a sense of overwhelm and frustration because the list never comes to an end or items are moved from one day’s list to the next in perpetuity. This is where self-awareness is imperative to understand how to most effectively create a list system that works for you. 

Time Blocking

There are many schools of thought on time blocking techniques, however, one of the simplest ways to time block is to set a timer for a specific set of tasks, i.e. 10 minutes to check and respond to emails. 30 minutes to review presentation notes, etc. Time blocking is especially useful if you find yourself becoming distracted while trying to perform various tasks.

Batching

This tool works especially well if you are a content creator or work in a highly repetitive industry. For example batching would be useful to divide up your week into work flows such as, dedicating Mondays to social media content creation and blog post, Tuesday is dedicated to payroll and accounting functions, Wednesday is dedicated to updating the website and email list, etc. Batching is helpful in creating a flow state for a specific set of tasks.

Tech-Based Productivity Tools

If you’re more technologically inclined tech-based productivity, scheduling, and project management tools are great ways to implement some of the time management strategies we’ve already discussed. Using tech-based tools also makes it easy to pull historical data for conducting future time audits.

Next Steps.

Now that you’re familiar with a variety of simple and generally cost effective time management tools, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and begin to experiment and see which tool or combination of tools works best for you. I hope these strategies help you take ownership of your time and transform how you spend your days.