Many of the success stories of famous business men and women can be boiled down to time management skills.
This is because most entrepreneurs know that the more productive you are with the time you have, the more success you are likely to achieve. This is why time management is so vital for achieving success.
Consider one important benefit of time management: you take the time you have and reinvest it on what matters to you. This alone puts you on the path to success. All it takes is good time management.
If you want to improve your time management skills, start by following these simple tips:
Time Management Tips for Achieving Success
1. Have a Clear Goal
If you want to improve your time management skills, you need to be clear on what your goals are. It’s difficult to improve how you manage your time if you’re not sure what you’re working towards. You need to be able to visualize your end goal.
Consider the goals you have for yourself and their levels of importance. Is there something that stands out most? If there is, capture that goal and keep it in mind as you practice the following tips. Your goal will guide and motivate you in your journey into better time management.
2. Get Organized
Once you have determined what your goals are, you need to get acquainted with everything you must do. For this, you need to get organized. Getting organized will help you figure out exactly what must get done and your deadline to finish it.
Make a list with all the tasks you need to complete. The level of importance of urgency of each task doesn’t matter at this point. Just get all of your tasks down on paper in the order that they come into your mind.
3. Prioritize Your Tasks
Now that you have a complete understanding of what you need to do, arrange each task by level of importance. You wait until you have all your tasks listed before you arrange them because it’s difficult to determine the importance of a task without the context of your whole list.
The most urgent and significant tasks should go on the top, while the least important tasks should go at the bottom. Revise the list by going over the least important tasks. Do they really need to get done? Is there any task you can remove? If so, remove them. The idea is to have a complete list.
4. Make a Daily Plan
With your revised list in hand, make a point of scheduling out your day, every day. Your daily plan should consist of two sections: one with the three most important tasks you need to complete that day, and another with three slightly less important tasks.
Next, schedule your day around your tasks, allocating a specific amount of time for each. Keep other responsibilities in mind as you plan your daily schedule.
The idea is not to ignore all other responsibilities until your tasks are finished, but to try your best to complete as many tasks as you can.
5. Remove Any Distractions
Distractions can take many unexpected, and sometimes unnoticeable, forms. From the work email notifications on your phone to even a random noise coming from another room. It seems everything demands more and more attention. The only way to counteract this is by removing distractions.
After planning your day and getting ready to complete a task, make sure your environment helps you focus. Even the smallest distractions need to be removed. If they aren’t, they can take precious time and energy that could be focused on doing the things that truly matter to you.
6. Break Down Each Task
Some tasks are bigger than others. As such, it can get overwhelming to complete them without the proper techniques. Learning how to manage each task or responsibility is thus key to improving your time management skills.
When you have a big task to complete, break it down into manageable sections. Afterward, handle each section as if it were its own individual task. This will help reduce some of the overwhelm and allow you to focus on the smaller parts that make up the whole.
7. Avoid Multitasking
Multitasking is one of those time management techniques that may make sense to follow. At first, it might seem productive to focus on multiple tasks at the same time. Perhaps it seems as if working in this way will reduce the time it takes to complete your tasks.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Multitasking doesn’t make you more productive, but rather reduces the much-needed concentration you have to complete your tasks.
Avoid multitasking as much as possible whenever you get started on your task. Success is achieved through the quality of your hard work, and multitasking harms the quality of the work you do.
8. Work in Chunks of Time
One technique that might actually work to manage multiple tasks per day is time-chunking. To time-chunk your day means you are breaking up your day into smaller chunks of time and allocating each chunk to a specific task or goal.
This technique can help you manage your time better because it reduces the amount of distractions you give your attention to.
By setting the boundaries of time chunks, you can better focus on a previously planned task or responsibility, ignoring any distractions that might come your way.
9. Don’t Complete Every Task
For as important as it is to do the most you can with your day, the truth is that not every task needs to get done. Even if they did, taking on more tasks than you are able to complete can be exhausting for your physical and emotional health.
If there are any tasks that are less important, or even unrequired, opt to leave them unfinished. This will help you use your time more efficiently by learning to differentiate between important and unimportant tasks.
10. Take Regular Breaks
This tip can seem like a counterintuitive approach to time management, but taking breaks is actually really important. Making sure your physical and emotional needs are met is crucial to being productive. As such, break a necessary part of achieving success.
Take regular breaks to get a mental and physical break from your work. Whatever rest looks like for you, practice it on a regular basis to establish and maintain healthy boundaries between you and your work.
Final Thoughts
The best to manage your time efficiently is by implementing techniques that help you focus your attention on what matters most to you.
Start your time management training by thinking about what your overall goal is. How do you define success? Whatever your goal looks like, what you do with your time should be centered in one way or another around said goal.
Once you know what you’re striving for, implement simple techniques such as planning your day, getting organized, minimizing distractions, and taking regular breaks. All will assist you in achieving the success you want for yourself through better time management.
About the Author
Daniel Martin has hands-on experience in digital marketing since 2007 and has been building teams and coaching others to foster innovation and solve real-time problems. Dan also enjoys photography and traveling.
