How to successfully manage your time and avoid mounting deadlines
Time management is extremely crucial when you have several tasks at hand and a limited time to complete them, learning to prioritize and correctly allocate time can be fundamental to the success of your work and in your overall wellbeing and levels of stress.
Here are some tips on how you can get better at managing your time!
How are you spending your time?
You can log your daily activity in a journal for a week to get a closer understanding of what takes up your time, this is also important as it will help you outline where you are spending the most time and what are time-sucking activities. This will also aid in focusing on activities that provide the greatest returns and gain an accurate sense of how long certain types of tasks take you.
Create a daily schedule
Create a list of the most pressing tasks for the day, this will help you identify your objectives for the day, this will create less anxiousness as you will have everything laid out and will stop ruminating thoughts.
Prioritise
As you organise your to-do list, prioritization is key for successful time management, organise your list by order of importance instead of urgency.
The following model: Eisenhower Matrix is a great organizational tool for prioritizing tasks based on importance and urgency.
Group Tasks
A way to save time is to create separate time chinks for answering emails, making phone calls, copywriting, etc. You can even mute emails and phone calls to eliminate distractions- once each time slot is completed, take a short break, and move to the next.
Assign a deadline
Setting a time limit helps with checking a task off and ensures you do not waste more time than needed on a task, which allows more time to do other things and time for you.
Tools to use
There are various time-management techniques available based on your work style, the Pomodoro technique is a popular method, where you can work in 25-minute intervals, taking a short break between each time allotted. Timeboxing is also a great productivity tool you can use which lets you block out varying amounts of time. You can find out the best method for you here.
