Excellent time management is a source of energy, enthusiasm, and a positive mental attitude. Time management behaviors are a matter of choice. You choose to focus and concentrate on your highest va...
Excellent time management is a source of energy, enthusiasm, and a positive mental attitude. Time management behaviors are a matter of choice. You choose to focus and concentrate on your highest value tasks, or you choose to spend your time on activities that contribute little value to your life. You’re always free to choose your quality of life. The starting point of overcoming your earlier programming and eliminating the mental blocks of what time management is if for your you to make a clear, unequivocal decision to become excellent at the way you use your time. Everything follows from that. Let’s look at some time management tips and habits that will help us make our future better.
Use a to-do list
It doesn’t matter what system you use for a to-do list. The general principle of productivity is that our brain is for having ideas not for holding them and a big part of why we let stuff slip through the cracks when it comes to managing our time and managing our productivity is because we haven’t written them down. So anytime you need to do something, you write it down on an app. Another way you can tabulate your to-do list is to use a pen and paper medium.
Time blocking
This is something that Elon Musk does all the time. The idea here is that anytime we need to do something, we put a block for it in our calendar. You don’t have to do this for absolutely everything because it may seem like the more time you spend managing your productivity, the less time you must accomplish those tasks. But the one thing that you must mark in your daily calendar is your daily highlight. It is the one most important task that you must conduct the following day. It is nice and reassuring to do. It means that, that one thing you’ve decided is important is always going to be completed because it is always on the schedule. You can even move it around if something comes up but at least it’s there on the schedule by default.
Parkinson’s law
The principle of this law is that work expands to fill the time that we distribute to it. So, the actionable advice here is to leverage artificial deadlines. If you have it on your to-do list without a deadline, without a schedule, it will just inevitably never get done.
Protected time
If you are an entrepreneur or if you’re working for yourself, you end up being able to set whatever schedule you want but if you’re doing freelancing then inevitability, you will have tons and tons of connections to make and zoom calls to attend. So, you can have a timestamp, a period in a day for yourself, where you can think about your business or plan more things to do in the future. You can also focus on self-productivity and your health in that period. You can plan to do things that help you move forward in your life and career or maybe just relax and have some leisure time.
Delegation
This one is a bit weird because usually when you say delegate people usually imagine that they can’t afford to delegate something. They say they don’t have enough money to delegate, to hire someone. Sure, that is true, but another way that you can think of this is to think that what is the dollar value of your time. How much is your time worth? If you decide that perhaps every hour in your day is worth $25 and if you find someone who can do that work for you for less than $25 then you should go for it. This will encourage you to get a cleaner day to focus on tasks that require your sole involvement.
Automated scheduling
Now that was in the time of zoom calls and chatting with people over the internet, you may waste a lot of time in scheduling back and forth like asking someone what time you are free for a call and then you tell them what time you are free and then they again respond if they are free in that period. What you can do is try an app like Calendly. What it does is that it helps send people a link that holds your whole schedule and all your availability so they can just book a slot in your calendar. Not having to worry about scheduling can help save you a lot of time and gets your work done faster.
