How to use time effectively – 5 Key Tips

How to use time effectively? This is a detailed article about using the time to give the best results you want. Naturally, time is one of the scarcest resources. Also, time is the one thing that is distributed uniformly across all people in this world! Not all of us are born with the same riches, facilities, opportunities, features, environment and so on. If there is something in the world that unites us all together and keeps all discrimination at bay, it is time.

What makes the difference then? Is it our internal tuning? Is it how we react, is it how we utilize our time, is it how efficient we are, is it how best and how fast we can complete things without compromising on quality? Looks like we are getting somewhere here. Let us see how best we could utilize our time so that we get the best out of a situation. We looked through a few management books but finally realized things can be as basic as the following:

How to use time effectively?

In this article, we talk about the 5 key tips on how to use time effectively. If you’re interested, I’d recommend reading through our presentation on time management for a detailed explanation.

Tips to manage time better:

• Organising your priorities
• Multitasking
• Avoiding procrastination or using procrastination for your benefit
• Identifying your most productive time
• Taking Breaks

Organize Your priorities

The first thing on how to use time effectively is also the most prominent one. It is about your priorities that define time available for things that matter the most to you.

Make a list! Well, I wouldn’t suggest the same, but it does help to know all are the things that are on the platter.  Once you do this list – organise by priorities. You can follow multiple frameworks, but usually, the best one is Eisenhower Matrix. This helps you to differentiate between the urgent and important items on your list.

Note that you don’t have to do everything. Urgent doesn’t necessarily mean important and vice versa. Be clever about the strategy you choose to pick your items from the list. Once you know this, you can use subsequent frameworks such as 4Ds of time management – to decide the best route. Sometimes, procrastination might not be as bad as it sounds like a route forward.

Grouping Projects

It might be an outdated concept, but there are tasks that might not need your full concentration – for such tasks, I would recommend grouping a few activities together. These can be about listening to podcasts as you workout or music for entertainment.

You might also listen to an audiobook while commuting on train etc. There are multiple ways that you can use the time to get your results. If you badly want something, you have to be creative with your time. And sometimes, multi-tasking does help in the process.

Procrastination 

Procrastination is the thief of time. It so happens that most times I would make the prioritization and realize that some things were very simple and easy. I would keep them to the end so that I could finish them all fast.

But it did something more than that, it started pressurizing me cos I realized there were 2x things to do. I am a smart man, I did know that x things were easy, but even then I didn’t do them – maybe I found them too easy. However, I tried the other way round, finished off the easy bits first, made life a little lesser hell.

I know the point I am driving here is very small and very easy to overlook as well. But when I did it, I realized that it is a lot easier to finish things off than procrastinate. It did make sense to a certain extent to do the easy things first. Though it was not the biggest completion or achievement, it still took a lot of things off the list which was a huge load off the back. There are some simple tricks to avoid procrastination which can go a long way in balancing time available for yourself.

Identify your best working time

For me, it did take a long time to realize that I was at my best in the mornings, the energy was at its best, the efficiency and the way I handled things was much faster than any time of the day. The noon was one of the most torrid times. Even then, I used to get up at 9 in the morning and be all stressed out about things.

Thought I would revamp the schedule a little, realized that the day had a lot more time than it used to. Now I find a little more time to meet people, complete my work and also organize things better. Efficient Work doesn’t necessarily mean spending 10 hrs at the office. It means finishing off the work in a much shorter duration so that we have more time for ourselves and for things which are equally if not more important.

Take Breaks 

It might sound counterproductive when we talk about how to manage time effectively to talk about breaks. But they are very helpful in keeping you sane.

It takes me back to the days when I was an engineer at my first job. The most challenging time for me used to be the afternoons, right after lunch! I was smart- or so I told myself! I used to force myself to work, only to realize that I would be stuck at the same line of code for hours together and the reasons being as small as I had made a spelling error!

But trying something as small as a 15-minute nap made a world of difference. The lesson was, there is no point in trying to force ourselves beyond the zone where we aren’t ready. It makes a lot more sense to take the rhythmic breaks and mix it up well.

We are not here just to win a trophy, the bigger picture is still us and our well being over everything else. Every other urgency is our perception of it. On the bigger picture,, probably these things and deadlines might not matter at all :)