The Best Time Management Tips and Strategies

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Improve your productivity with the best time management tips and strategies to make your week more productive and get more done!

Do you ever look at that person in your life who always seems to tackle a mountain of work with ease and wonder how they do it?

Believe it or not, working effectively and still having time to spare isn’t a rare talent but rather a display of a productive skillset.

And guess what? You, too, can accomplish your daily goals and better manage your and your days by improving your time management skills! 

What is Time Management?

Time management is the way we plan and organize our time between different activities or priorities. When this skill is used effectively, it’s been found that time management:

• Reduces stress 
• Increases life satisfaction
• Creates better work-life balance 
• Increases productivity 
• Helps lessen procrastination 

So, if you want to learn how to be an expert in time management, keep on reading to learn practical time management tips and techniques that’ll help you kickstart your productivity, starting with your to-do list.

Why is time management important? 

Time management helps ensure that you’ve allocated the right amount of time and energy to get your most important tasks completed each day.

When you better manage your time, you can increase your productivity, reduce stress, and create more opportunities to do the things you want. 

It sounds like a good deal, right?

So then, get ready to improve your time management skills and boost your productivity throughout the week with 7 of the best time management tips and strategies that we’ve rounded up for you: 

Tip: Learn how to prioritize tasks. 

First off, you must make sure that your goals are achievable.

We only have 24 hours in a day, and as much as we’d like to wish for more time, sometimes we simply cannot accomplish everything in a set timeframe.

So take some pressure off yourself by setting SMART goals, as in specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals. 

You can use Stephen Covey’s time management matrix to prioritize your tasks. This matrix consists of 4 quadrants: 

• urgent and important
• NOT urgent but important
• urgent but NOT important
• NOT urgent and NOT important

Delegating which tasks fall under each category by assessing its priority level will help you assess which activities are most important and better manage your time as a result. 

Strategy: Perform a time audit on yourself. 

Do you ever have those days when by the end of them, you think to yourself, “Where did all of the time go?” 

That’s your sign that it’s time to buckle down and figure out how long it takes you to accomplish each task on your list.

Once you know this, you can more strategically plan out your days and better allocate your time. 

Tip: Limit your distractions, and that includes emails and work messages. 

All of those Slack, text messages, and emails add up in response time, so try to respond to your messages in batches. It can be distracting and counterproductive to break focus from a task every five minutes to reply to a new message, and here’s a secret: people can wait. 

This is where prioritization comes in.

Set aside a few minutes during your downtime to reply to all your communications, and then do it again later when you wrap up the day. Limiting distractions like these helps keep you on track to achieve all your goals! 

Strategy: Get your most important assignments completed in the morning.

Be inspired to get up and at ‘em bright and early because that’s when you’re at your most focused and productive.

Don’t leave all your assignments that require the most mental energy till the end of the day. Instead, focus on getting those out of the way out first thing in the morning. 

Channel that early morning energy, and accomplish your most important and challenging tasks when you’re at your best. 

Tip: Don’t forget to take breaks in between tasks.

Relaxing in between work activities has been shown to reduce stress, help maintain productivity throughout the day, and reduce the need for a long recovery at the end of the day.

It’s easy to get lost in work sometimes, but giving yourself a short break allows you to reenergize and get your head back into the game!

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At the end of the day, time management gives you more time to do what you want to do, like spend time with your kids, experience new things, and more.

Take control of your time, and use these effective tips and strategies to improve your time management skills.