What Is Time Management?
Time management is a system that allows you to plan out in advance the exact amount of time you'd want to allocate to performing a specific task or tasks per day.
Making the most out of your day and ending it with that pleasant feeling of knowing you’ve done all you could do in that single 24-hour period - that’s what time management is all about. It means you’ve made effective use of your time and accomplished what you’ve set to do for yourself for the day.
Being good at managing your time makes you better at successfully completing all of your work and life-related activities, tasks, or responsibilities.
The principal idea behind efficient time management is to prioritize your work tasks based on their importance and urgency and estimate the time needed to complete them in advance.
What Are Time Management Strategies?
A time management strategy is the overall plan for effective time management. It can encompass a specific time management technique and a set of skills to perform it efficiently.
You can decide on a time management technique because you have the skills needed to successfully implement that technique, or choose a technique based on the skills you want to improve.
So for example:
- Let’s say you’ve just started practicing the Pomodoro technique, which centers on 25-minute-long bursts of work activity followed by 5-minute long breaks. This technique is great for improving your focus and concentration, as it’s all about short periods of productive work that add up when put together. So, in that case, your time management strategy would be to use the Pomodoro technique to improve your skills - focus, concentration, and, ultimately, your overall productivity.
You can decide on a time management technique because you have the skills needed to successfully implement that technique, or choose a technique based on the skills you want to improve.
Another example would be:
- If you are good at delegating and want to use that skill to create an effective strategy for time management, you could try the Getting Things Done or GTD technique. In this case, your overall time-management strategy would be to use your innate delegation skills to successfully implement the GTD technique and improve your and your team’s productivity.
Finally, if you don’t want to focus on any particular time management technique and create your own time management strategy instead, there are also ways to do that. We’ll talk about those ways in more detail, further in the article. But, for now, let’s talk about time management skills and try to explain the meaning behind the term.
6 Most Important Time Management Strategies
Time management strategies are an overall plan for improving your time management. You can make up your own strategy, try out different time management techniques and incorporate them into your strategy, work on individual skills, or do something completely different. At the end of the day, it’s completely up to you.
Here are some of the most popular time management strategies that have been proven to be successful time and time again.
1. Make a To-Do List
Many of us spend our days doing stuff and periodically wondering whether we forget something. Well, not anymore. A simple to-do list can alleviate that burden.
Usually, a to-do list should include your work tasks as well as any personal activities or responsibilities you wish to complete. Maintaining a proper balance between work and life obligations is important. This is where a to-do list gets very useful, as it allows you to see more clearly how much time you spend on each.
When you make your own to-do list, be sure to rank your tasks based on their importance. It’s easy to make a list of stuff that you can finish quickly. But, if you do that, you risk allocating insufficient time for the day's most important tasks.
To successfully use a to-do list time-management strategy, you should not only jot down your daily tasks but also regularly update and check your list. This will help you prioritize and make adjustments if anything unexpected pops up (e.g., a client wants a project report earlier than usual).
2. Tackle the Most Difficult Task First
This time-management strategy is centered around the idea that if you do the most difficult task of the day first, everything else will feel easy in comparison. It’s like diving into the deep end of the pool instead of slowly building up your way to it.
The downside is that this strategy might not work for everybody, as some people like to start their day with easier tasks and warm up, in a sense.
Tackling high-value tasks at the start of your work day might not be for everyone, but it has been proven as an effective time management strategy. To find out if starting your day with the most demanding tasks will improve the way you manage your time, all you have to do is try it.
3. Remove Any Distractions
Being distracted while you work can negatively impact your productivity and ability to accomplish your daily tasks successfully. So, it goes without saying that one of the most important time management strategies is to try and minimize any and all distractions.
To do that efficiently, you should:
- Identify the things that distract you from your work.
- Remove those distractions and/or try to minimize their impact on your productivity.
For example, if your phone is constantly chirping because someone created a new post on any of the social media you use, simply turn off your phone. If checking emails or slack messages distracts you from completing your tasks, try to either turn off the notifications or avoid checking them until you finish your work.
You can give website blockers or app blockers a try. Those are apps that block specific websites or other apps (you choose which ones you want to block) that distracts you during work.
4. Lead a Healthier Lifestyle
A huge part of a successful time management strategy is ensuring you lead a healthy lifestyle.
Now, don’t get us wrong, this is not a way to tell you how to live your life, far from it. It’s about showing you the importance of managing and increasing your energy levels to increase your productivity and concentration.
Studies have shown that people who exercise and eat healthy foods regularly have higher energy levels when compared to those who don’t. And having more energy means you will be able to spend more of it on completing your tasks, projects, and activities in a more productive and stress-free manner.
5. Figure Out and Set Your Priorities
Finding out what your priorities are and setting them according to their importance is another great strategy that can be used to manage your time. Making a clear distinction between what's important and what’s not can help you improve your daily productivity significantly.
By organizing your tasks according to their priority, you’ll have a clear vision of what needs to be done and in what order. You might even surprise yourself by discovering that some tasks don’t need to be completed at all. That’s the power of setting priorities.
6. Try Out Software
When all else fails, turn to the machine.
For almost any pain point, regardless of whether it’s connected to time management, software tries to solve it. And, some of them actually do solve the problem of efficiently managing time, tasks, projects, and more.
What Are Time Management Techniques?
Time management techniques are specific methods that, when implemented into your daily schedule, can help advance how you manage your time.
For the most part, time management techniques have been proven to be quite successful, with one important caveat – not every technique will work for everybody. This means that there’s no “one size fits all” regarding this matter.
Some time management techniques are related to specific skills or skill sets. Naturally, people who already possess these skills will find the technique in question easier to implement. For example, the Pickle Jar technique centers around one particular skill – visualization. So, if you’re good at visualizing, you’ll have no trouble with this technique.
On the other hand, if visualizing tasks is not your forte, this technique might help you develop this skill. All you have to do is be open to the challenge.
Luckily, there are many different time management techniques, so you can be confident you’ll easily find the one that suits your needs.
17 Most Important Time Management Techniques
The most popular and successful ones are:
1. The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro time management technique was invented by Francesco Cirillo. He used a kitchen timer to split his work into 25-minute intervals. Every period of work, or as he called it, pomodoro, was followed by a short break, usually lasting around 5 minutes.
The name “pomodoro” comes from the Italian word for “tomato.” Cirillo chose this name because the kitchen timer he used to split his work periods looked exactly like a tomato.
If you want to try out the Pomodoro method for yourself, you should do the following:
- Choose a task you wish to complete.
- Start a 25-minute timer. You could use an online stopwatch or the one on your phone.
- Do some work until the clock runs out.
- After the 25-minute interval ends, take a 5-minute break.
- Following the 4th pomodoro period, take a longer 25-30 minutes break.
- Rinse and repeat until your task is done or until you feel you’ve done enough for the day.
2. Eisenhower Matrix
Developed by the 34th US president, Dwight Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Matrix is a time management technique that focuses on prioritizing tasks in terms of their importance and urgency. The more important and urgent a specific task is, the higher it should be on the “to-do” list.
To try out the Eisenhower Matrix and see if it works for your specific needs, do the following steps:
- Create 4 quadrants with these categories: Important and Urgent, Important but Not Urgent, Not important but Urgent, Not important and Not Urgent.
- Take a closer look at your current tasks and put them into those 4 quadrants based on the previously mentioned parameters.
- Important and Urgent - you do them immediately.
- Important but Not Urgent - you schedule a time to do them in the future.
- Not important but Urgent - delegate these tasks.
- Not important and Not Urgent - delete these task.
