Time management is one of the most common topics with a huge impact on your everyday life. In this article, we talk about a few tips on how best to manage this time to give you the best results. Most of us have a similar experience with time – there is never enough of it. Due to the rushed lives we live – something or the other is pushed to the bottom of our To-Do list. How do we ensure that we have time for things that matter the most?

What is time management?

We all know this! Anything that’s in short supply will need management. The fact that most of us are so busy calls for time management. The main point about time management is to have time for the things that we want to do. The masters of time management do this well by ensuring that they don’t waste time on unimportant things. This obviously means that we have to be tough and objective about what items demand the work vs the ones that can be postponed.

The difficult part is that all these tasks appear important, urgent and demand our attention. This is where we will have to take a step back and decide what’s most important and why. And that’s the art of prioritisation isn’t it? Everything in our list must earn its place. And if it is not important, we ought to find a way to push it to the bottom of the list. And hopefully this articles helps to think about how best to start using time for your benefit.

Ultimately, time management is all about ensuring that you create opportunities you desire for your everyday. If we focus on that, then we have a good chance at time management.

5 Time Management Quotes to inspire time management

I hope these quotes inspire the reasons, justifications and desires for time management. They all impress the point that time is the most important thing. The main thing is to ensure that we don’t waste time on unimportant things and compromise the ones that it is used to serve us.

Time is the most valuable coin in your life, you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you don’t let other people spend it for you! – Carl Sandburg

The key is not to spending time but in investing it – Stephen Covey (Source)

You will never have time for anything, if you want time, you must make it – Charles Buxton

It’s not enough to be busy, the question is what we’re busy about – Henry David Thoreau

Time is not the main thing, it is the only thing – Miles Davis (Source)

10 Effective Time Management Techniques to Boost Productivity

I hate using the word hack because it makes time management appear easy. The reason to write this article is to appreciate how hard and complex it is. I don’t want to make the mistake of reducing its importance by calling it trivial or a hack .There’s no hack around time management. We will have to work hard and become good at it. There will be some tricks as we talk below, but they will all demand practice and work. A concise version is available as Time management PPt for a free download if you’re interested.

Things we cover in this article are:

• Frameworks for prioritisation: Eisenhower Matrix, 4D’s of Time Management
• Grouping things for multi tasking
• Power of procrastination and using it to delegate
• Creating time blocks for unknown challenges, new tasks etc

Prioritisation for Time

Let’s start with the first most important part of time management – prioritisation. Time is short, we don’t have a lot of it. So, let’s focus on what’s most important and do them first. The others can follow up. We can take some lessons from roadmap management to define the things that are most important and valuable. One of the simplest but most effective frameworks I’ve seen is the Eisenhower Matrix which balances urgency vs importance to manage things in our list.

So, let’s start with simple steps to prioritise according to the Eisenhower Matrix:

Steps to Use the Eisenhower Matrix:

List Your Tasks: Write down everything you need to do.

Categorize: Place each task in one of four boxes:

• Urgent and Important: Do these first.
• Important but Not Urgent: Schedule these for later.
• Urgent but Not Important: Delegate if possible.
• Neither Urgent nor Important: Eliminate these tasks.

This gives you a clear framework to say NO to a few things while you work on some other things.

Planning and learning from feedback

Time management is a skill. You will get better at with time and experience. For that to happen, you’ll have to take feedback and improve this skill. After you’ve done the prioritisation and worked on some of your tasks, review how it has went. While you review this, make sure that you’re honest and purposeful about finding ways to improve.

When you review your feedback, go back to the initial process you used for prioritisation. Ultimately, you need to get to a process that works best for you. So, feel free to adapt the Eisenhower Matrix based on your time availability, things that are important to you etc. Some of the common mistakes we make with the matrix are:

• Urgent need not mean important all the time: You need to define what is urgent and important to you – where the odds are more and where there are bigger advantages. Make clear segregation and place each one of them properly. Remember the bigger picture is your life!
• Plan a lax time: We all are humans and it is not the easiest to finish a project right on the time we promised ourselves. A famous cricketer once said – I don’t see the target score at 50 overs but I see it at 49! That way, he gets that extra over if he makes a mistake. Build that sense of hurry within yourself, keep an advance deadline so that the final day or final hour could be used to do final polishing.
• Make your mistakes sooner. The trick of any business is acting upon a mistake before it happens. I know it sounds crazy, but there is beauty in anticipation. Try and build that art in yourself, make room for mistakes.

KEY TIP: Try creating a “Mistakes Log” where you jot down errors and the lessons learned from them. This proactive approach helps you identify patterns and improve your planning skills.

Easy one Last?

Don’t procrastinate. I know it is easy for me to say, but the most common mistake is that we keep the things that we think are easy to the end. The problem iwth this approach is that the list goes longer. Instead, if you are able to cross these off the list, it gives you the comfort and confidence that you’re finishing off the things and the list looks more manageable.

Unfortunately – most times we end up underestimating the challenge and overestimating our capacity. At some point, we need to see what really is happening. The question is whether we do it or not. If you don’t then it is really amazing that you treat each of these challenges equally. Having said that – understand how important they are. If they are very easy for you – then there might be some good news. You can combine this project with something else and finish it off so that it is one more item crossed off from your list.

There is great joy in crossing off something from your list. Don’t do it on the computer – do it on your pen and paper, there is a great amount of satisfaction in that.

Procrastination isn’t always bad for time management

It is as simple as this – Procrastination is the thief of time. We somehow seem to believe that there is more time tomorrow than today and we are certainly very wrong to do that.

Tomorrow is just like today, we have the same 24Hrs. Some say that we will do it tomorrow when we are better and more efficient. But in order to be that efficient, you got to make those relevant mistakes. There is no way you can do great without trying and setting yourself free. – How to stop procrastinating

And tomorrow is not at all going to be easy, it is not going to be simple at all. It is going to be worse or if you think that it can be worse then maybe we have better motivation to work today.

Chunking/Grouping similar tasks together

This is one of my favourite time management techniques of time management. As the word indicates chunking is a way of simplifying your project.

I understand that most of the projects we are involved in are complicated and they take a little more time than a week or two. But a deadline of more than 3 weeks is hard to follow up since there is no fire to push us into action.

We all respond to an immediate fear/challenge as opposed to the slow build-up of a problem. This is perhaps why we all join the gym when we are 10 pounds overweight – not at the first two!

Make smaller deadlines for each of these long term projects – may be weekly ones or maybe twice in a week. Don’t make it one per day – it becomes too taxing and too ad hoc to keep working that way. Give yourself some lead time.

Multitasking to manage time

Another fascinating technique of time management is combining tasks. There are various tasks you can combine to make your projects interesting and more fun

• You can combine reading a book with travel
• You can combine relaxation with gym by listening to a song
• You can combine audio book with running in the park
• Relationship with work by choosing to work with your partner on an activity. 
• Spiritual and Social needs by choosing something like working with an NGO.

There are so many other ways you can combine activities to reach your own fulfilment. Try and look within – you will be amazed that there are so many things you can do together.

And if you can think of any such modes, please write to us below, we would love to update this space with your suggestions.

Identifying when you’re most productive time

We all have ‘Our Zones’ where our efficiency is at its peak and the mistakes are minimal with the concentration at its highest.

Identify what time of the day you are performing best and slot that to your most important project. This time of the day should be promised to your prime priority and nothing else. It can be an urgent one or a distant one – whichever rates highest in your priority list.

We all know that the time spent on hard work is not directly proportional to the result. Mere hard work doesn’t take you much far, it has to be combined with smart work. There is little result in spending 10Hrs on something which could be done in 10 mins if only it was placed properly in your schedule.

Time is the most precious thing you have and you would want to make the best use of it.

So.. look inwards a bit, know a little more about yourself and the external world will get a lot smoother.

Taking Sensible Breaks

All work and no play makes John, Johny, Janardhan, mike, daniel, lucy and ….. a dull boy/girl. Time your breaks as per your convenience.

We have already established that mere back-breaking work will not take you far. You need to be smart, you need to use your resources at your best. Coming to think of it – time management is not too different from resource management.

Take dedicated breaks, refresh yourself and come back with a rejuvenation. It is not just nice, it is necessary. You don’t want to overwork the most important resource you have – your mind.

And you don’t need to fall into the challenges of stress management when you are busy with time management. Let us keep it pretty simple and separated or else things are bound to get messier.

Working overtime to creating the illusion of time management

Now, this is something which I am not at all comfortable doing – let alone recommend.

We know the rules of accepting a project – when you accept to do something – you need to understand your capacities and promise the time accordingly.

We all are bound by a deadline and it seems imperative to work overtime sometimes. But make sure that you compensate it accordingly.

If you don’t do it, there is a great chance that you burn out and end up spending more hours at the work table than actual results.

If you are a student, it is not about sitting in front of the books for 10Hrs just cos the exams are near. It is about finishing the same in 6hrs by training your concentration to be at its optimum level.

You might say it is impossible – but it all depends on how much of it you believe. It can very well be easily achievable and impossible might be just another word invented by the brain to delay the process or explain any mistakes in the project.

Looking at The Big Picture

I know that we all live in a fast-paced world and time management is paramount. Perhaps it is the most important skill you need to master.

But at the same time, we all need to know that our lives are more important than the projects we are involved in. I do understand that the projects get to our nerves when the deadline approaches.

But the key to differentiating stress and time management is the holistic approach and knowing your priorities very well.

And your life and well being is the biggest priority of all most times. The rest of the things can really wait!

These were our top 10 tips for time management. Please do let us know your thoughts below, we would love to add a few more or remove a few which you think might be unnecessary. Or if there is any challenge that is on your mind, we would love to think out of the box to help formulate a plan for your time management.