I then track each of these chunks on my daily to-do list, marking how many it took to complete a task.
20+ Time management tips and strategies to make you more efficient at work
This way at the end of the day I have real-time feedback on how long tasks took me and where I might have been wasting time. Goal-setting is one of the cornerstones of time management. Read our full guide to effective goal-setting here. Time management starts from the moment you wake up. And with the right morning routine , you can set yourself up for a day of productive, meaningful work. A morning routine gives you a chance to start with positive momentum that will carry you through the rest of the day. While each routine should be individually tailored, there are a few key qualities you should aim to hit:.
This might sound like a lot to pack into your AM, but doing the legwork early on will help keep you focused throughout the day. You can even add your morning routine into your schedule like designer Dan Mall does:. To read more about how to craft your own, check out this post and download our free morning routines template.
Instead, a much more powerful time management strategy is to commit to single-tasking.
Doing one thing at a time has been shown to rebuild our focus, strengthen our attention span, and even help us get more done. Sometimes simply acknowledging the distraction is enough to loosen its grip on you. Despite your best efforts to plan out your day, tasks will always get thrown at you last minute.
Eisenhower, who proposed a simple matrix for categorizing your tasks. These tasks are either expected or unexpected. Important and non urgent: Not important but urgent: These are the distractions that hold you back from doing good work. Try to delegate or reschedule as many of them as possible. Not important and not urgent: Drop these as much as possible. By classifying your work in this way, you can start to prioritize your time and map out a schedule that allows you to do more of the important work and less of the not important.
But to properly manage your time, you need to know what to spend time on as well as what not to. While there are many ways to prioritize your workload, one especially effective way comes from billionaire investor Warren Buffett. To which Buffett responded:. Every behavior and choice we make has a cost. As author John C.
In his book Procrastinate on Purpose , author Rory Vaden explains how this is a false argument. If you have a task that takes 5 minutes a day to do, budget 30x that time so, minutes to train someone else to do it. That might seem like a huge waste of time right away, but multiply that 5 minutes a day across the annual working days and you would personally be spending a staggering minutes on that task.
Taking the time to delegate and train someone else gives you a net gain of minutes a year. This is especially true when it comes to time management. We crave acceptance and gratitude, and saying yes is one of the easiest ways to get this. But how should you best set that up? Here are some helpful tips on how to use your schedule to manage time effectively. What I mean is that we focus on our to-do list and deadlines, rather than creating a repeatable schedule we can work to.
Working to a schedule rather than to a deadline ensures we get a little bit closer to our goal every single day. If your days are spent with massive or open-ended to-do list items, you more than likely spend too long on a single task. But does that mean I only put down one item? Instead, I have multiple items on a list that all could take an entire day to do.
Clearly this is a problem. According to Peter Bregman, author of Four Seconds: That fact becomes clear the instant we try to cram an unrealistic number of things into a finite space. Every task he has is then designated as many slots as is needed.
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In our blog post-writing example, this could mean committing to finishing the outline or writing just the body copy and leaving the introduction, conclusion, and editing for another day. When we fill out our daily schedules, how often do we put in blocks of time for breaks or interruptions? But real life is chaotic. As the researchers wrote in Harvard Business Review: When it goes off, switch tasks: Organize your reimbursement receipts, check your email, or clean your desk, and then return to the original task.
Want to Manage Your Time Effectively?
Your calendar is your greatest tool when it comes to time management. Years ago, essayist, programmer, and venture capitalist Paul Graham looked at this exact issue and proposed two very different ways of scheduling your work day: They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. Unfortunately, most of us sit somewhere in the middle. We need to carve time into our day to both manage and make. Each day has a template that involves time for admin, paperwork, and external meetings Manager time as well as large chunks dedicated solely to internal meetings and daily work Maker time.
According to Jarvis , the key is in batching his writing:. What I find works with that is two things:. And the next article will take 30 minutes. Then the next two will take 15 minutes each. We also build our self-efficacy, which is basically our belief in our own abilities. This helps us be more confident in our work, get more done in less time, and be more consistent with our output.
Changing location throughout the day can be a great way to keep our motivation and productivity up. But I don't want those items cluttering up my list for today; that will just make today seem even busier than it already is. My solution is to make a big list of everything I need to do.
Then, every night, I move a few things to my to-do list for the next day. I use one big list with priority markers so that anything "high" priority moves to the top and becomes part of my "today" list. That lets me focus on what I must do today , but it also gives me a place to dump every little task I think of that someday must get done.
That way you won't waste energy trying to remember important ideas and you'll ensure today won't feel overwhelming. Measure your results, not your time. The whole idea of working smarter rather than harder stems from the fact that many of us put in more and more hours only to find we don't get more done. That's why we want to find methods to be more productive in less time.
One way to do this is to adjust the way you measure productivity. If you evaluate yourself by what you actually get done rather than the time it takes to get something done, you'll start to notice a difference in how you work. For example, if you have a big project to complete, try breaking it down into "completable" sections.
BRIAN TRACY
For instance, I like to break down my blog posts into sections and small tasks like adding images. With a set of smaller tasks making up a big project, I can check off what I get done each day, even if it takes me many days to finish the whole project. I get a nice little rush every time I check off a task within a blog post, even if it was just a word section.
It helps me maintain momentum and keep going until the whole post is done. Another way to measure what you get done each day is to keep a "done list," a running log of everything you complete in a day. I scoffed at done lists for a long time until I joined Buffer, where we all share what we've done each day using iDoneThis.
5 Unexpected Ways To Get More Done
If you start keeping a list of everything you get done in a day, you might be surprised how much more motivated you are to do work that matters and stay focused so you get even more done. Build habits to help you start working. If I don't have a plan for what to work on first, I tend to procrastinate and waste time in the mornings.
You might have a different danger time for procrastination , but getting started seems to be a hurdle for most of us. One way to overcome this problem is building a routine that tells your brain and body it's time to work. Your routine could be something as simple as your daily commute or grabbing a coffee on the way to work. I usually sit at my desk with my coffee and check up on my favorite sites to see if there's any news.
Once my coffee is finished, that's my cut-off point: It's my trigger to start working. Other ways to get into a working mindset can include sitting down at your desk or workspace, turning off your phone or putting it away , exercising , stretching, or eating breakfast. You could even have an album or playlist that gets you in the mood to work and listen to that as part of your routine.
The same technique works on weekends, too. Although you might be tempted to let go of your routine entirely on your days off, our CEO has found that maintaining a weekend routine that doesn't differ too much from his weekdays works well: The more he let go of his routine on the weekends, the longer it took him to pick it up again during the week. Routines aren't a sign of boring, regimented people.
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Routines are a sign of people who have goals and have found the best way-- for them --to actually accomplish their goals. Track where you waste time. If you're struggling to be productive, it's tempting to change your routine or try new solutions before you uncover the real problem. I've done this in the past and found it never leads to a long-term solution. The first step in becoming more productive is to identify your regular time-sucks. Start by tracking what you do every morning to get ready for work.
You might find you're spending time on things such as choosing your clothes, something you could do the night before. Or like our co-founder, you could just wear jeans and a white t-shirt every day. Track how you spend your time during the day and look for patterns. A tool like RescueTime can help. Maybe you'll find you're getting caught up on Facebook too often. Or that what should have been a two-minute work conversation regularly turns into a minute chat session. Once you know what takes up your time or leads you to procrastinate, start making specific changes around those habits. I used to waste a lot of time in the mornings checking out my favorite sites for news or updates.
Now I factor it into my routine; as I mentioned, I do it while I drink my coffee, and when the coffee is gone, it's time to start working. Build habits to help you stop working. This one might seem a bit strange, but it really works. Some of us struggle to stop working, rather than or as well as start working. It's easy to just keep going for another hour, or to get your computer out after dinner and work until well after bedtime.
Part 1: Understand where your time is going
The worst thing about these habits is that they encourage us to put off our MITs; we figure we'll be working long enough to be sure to get them done. But, of course, we don't. Quit while you're ahead.