5 Tips To Manage Time That Actually Work

Are you always running out of time? Do you want to accomplish more in your life? Wish if you could have more time? Worry no more!

Here are tips to manage time that will actually help you out. Tried & tested.

1. Plan Your Day In Advance

Time management takes a lot of planning. First, make sure you do a mind dump and put down everything you want to do or accomplish in your life on a piece of paper.

Why write it down? It’s because writing your thoughts on a piece of paper brings them one step closer to reality. That’s your main list. Save it and go through it every week.

Next step is weekly planning, where you try to plan your entire week. Again, make a list of all the things you need to do.

Once you have all the weekly tasks written out, try to separate the tasks day-wise. Sort them out, remove the unnecessary ones, and highlight the most important ones.

Pay attention now! This step is the actual one that makes a difference. Before you sleep at night, just plan out your next day. Now, some people do the same thing but in the morning. I got no results doing that. Then, I read one of the best books on how to manage time – Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy.

In the book, the author discusses how making your daily task list a night before gives a chance to your brain to prepare. While you sleep, your brain works on that task list, making you all ready for it the next day.

Try this strategy every day for a week and you’ll see a huge difference.

2. Prioritise Your Tasks

One of the biggest mistakes we do is try to do too much at the same time. You cannot do that. You have to pick.

It’s difficult. I always struggle at this step, however prioritising tasks will help you avoid the unimportant tasks and make you tackle the important ones first.

The author Brian Tracy talks of the 80-20 rule in his book. He says it’s the 20% tasks you do that will make an actual difference in your personal and professional life. 80% of them are either unimportant or aren’t needed at all.

Guess what! Most of us spend too much time on the useless 80%. We have to stop doing that and actually work on what’s important.

3. Deal With The Most Difficult Part First

Dad: Is this book really about eating frogs?

Well, in a way, it is. ‘Frog’ is the most difficult and ugliest task of the day, the one you have to do but you don’t want to. So, deal with it first because chances are you will procrastinate on this and never get this done until it’s last minute.

4. Accept That You Can’t Do Everything

I have been that person who used to think she could do anything. Add any work to my pile, the already overloaded and overflowing pile and I wouldn’t say no to it. Because, I thought I could do it. I should be able to do it. No.

You cannot do everything. Accept it. Some tasks are so meaningless that you don’t even need to do. Watching Grey’s Anatomy for four hours a day? Staring at the wall for half an hour a day? Chatting with your colleagues for hours in name of a short break? All these are unnecessary tasks.

Even the tasks that can be done by somebody else, an assistant or an intern, shouldn’t be handled by you. As a marketer, I often spend more than half of my time in documentation. An unnecessary and avoidable part that can be delegated, freeing up time for me to think of new marketing strategies or upgrade my knowledge.

Find out such tasks in your task list. If you cannot delegate them now, just keep them at the end. So, that you know which are the important tasks and get to them first.

5. Enjoy What You Do & Make Time For It

I get this asked often – how do you do so many things? You do it if you want to. Every time I see myself complaining about how I don’t have time, the inner voice tells me ten ways I can free up time and do that thing I want to do.

It’s all up to me – whether I really want to do or whether I want to keep making an excuse. In the end, time management is just about that – if you really want to do it, you would.

That’s how you manage time. By making lists, prioritising tasks, doing important things first, accepting that you can’t do everything and delegating some tasks, and by really doing them in the end.

Do you think these time management tips would help you out? If yes, comment below.