10 Key Time Management Skills for Purposeful Productivity
As the saying goes, time and tide wait for none.
So are you reliably ahead of the clock? Always running out of time? Or maybe just going with the flow, bobbing along and sipping a margarita?
Whatever your vibe, if youâre reading this, you know that time is valuable and you want to improve your relationship with it.
It goes (almost) without saying that learning to effectively manage your time will give you more control over your life. And when you're more in control of your life, youâre likely to feel truly free, more relaxed - and yes! - maybe even a little happier. This is true for busy people, people who just want to chill, parents who manage multiple schedules, and anyone who want to savor the good things in life.
Planning and managing your time efficiently can be a total game-changer when it comes to your working life. After all, how often do you find yourself bogged down in repetitive or draining tasks while wishing you had more time for the projects that mattered?
It might even be a given that you feel overwhelmed, rushed, and just constantly short on time. And if youâre used to the constant flow of information, your brain actually builds tolerance to digital stimulus, leading to difficulty concentrating, anxiety, and even digital addiction. The good news is that everyone else is in the exact same dilemma, though! We all have the same number of hours every day, to use or lose, as we please.
In this article, review the essential time management skills to help you navigate the endless onward march of hours, minutes, and seconds with ease.
What is Time Management?
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about time management? Maybe you picture a long, rigid, and complicated to-do list full of tasks that leave little to no room for yourself and the things you actually like to do.
Time management goes well beyond making a bottomless to-do list. Looking at the definition provided by the Cambridge Dictionary, time management can be described as: "the practice of using the time that you have available in a useful and effective way, especially in your work".
As you can understand, time management is the ability to use your time effectively, enhancing your productivity so as to achieve not only your daily tasks but also your long-term goals.
For this reason, time management skills will help you organize, prioritize, and delegate tasks and how you accomplish them with specific goals in mind. Are you ready to get skill-building?!
The first meaningful step to improve your time management skills is to understand that adopting a new approach to time is a significant mindset shift for most people. After all, good time management skills do not depend on external circumstances, but on your internal state and on your organizational abilities.
Why Is Time Management Important?
Time management truly plays an essential role in every aspect of life. While many people imagine time management as a professional pursuit, one of the major benefits of applying effective time management to working life is that you create windows of free time to use however you please - working out, spending time with friends and family, gardening, or catching up on Netflix. Hello, leisure time!!
The list of benefits of time management is virtually endless. When you effectively manage your time, you'll be able to do more in less time - and most importantly - with less stress. Research from Curtin University published in 2017 finds that effective time management has an inverse relationship with stress, indicating that good time management skills can significantly reduce the negative effects of stress on your physical and mental health.
Itâs important to note that most research in this field has been done with student subjects. When applying these findings to daily life, whether youâre a student or not, itâs helpful to consider the nature of your goals before investing in your time management approach. Not only will setting goals help you to track your progress and reduce productivity guilt; that feeling that youâre never doing enough. Setting goals will also help you to zero in on mundane, necessary tasks with peace of mind that youâre moving in the right direction.
Now thatâs blissful productivity đ
If you master time management skills, youâll likely become more punctual, organized, and disciplined - in other words, ready to take on the world with your impressive daily planning and forecasting abilities!
Spot the Warning Signs That Youâll Never Really Have Enough Time
Do you ever feel overwhelmed, always rushing from one place to another, your task list is always full and you feel like you never really have enough time for yourself? These are clear signs that you need to improve your time management skills. Whatâs the worst that can happen when we donât manage time effectively? You might live with a constantly nagging desire for more time and the difficult truth that youâll never really have enough time as things are.
In other wordsâŠan existential crisis.
Here are a few other warning signs you may be caught in a time warp with poor time management to blame:
You texting on the way to every meeting: âAhh so sorry, running 10 late!!â
Chronic procrastination that interferes with your daily life
Difficulty overcoming perfectionism to meet deadlines
Inability to set, prioritize and/or achieve goals
Consistent overworking to meet commitments
Resistance to or difficulty with establishing daily routines
Skills vs. Strategies: Developing Your Personal Competence
Although time management skills may sound self-explanatory, many people commonly confuse skills and strategies. And even more people mistakenly confuse skills with personality traits - when we think of time management skills like planning, prioritizing, and goal-setting, the image of a âdisciplined personâ naturally comes to mind.
In reality, anyone who is interested and able can learn time management skills. Time management strategies like daily schedule planning, time-tracking, and time blocking are like tools in your productivity toolbox. Time management skills like goal-setting give you the practical know-how to effectively use time management strategies.
Like learning any skill, it takes practice to nail time management. Be patient, recognize improvement and donât expect perfection if these skills are new to you.
10 Essential Time Management Skills and When to Use Them
There are a wide variety of time management skills out there, and it can be easy to feel a little lost. Check out the following list for the most essential time management skills, and when to use them:
1. Planning
Improving your time management skills means building a strategic mindset, and for this reason, detailed planning can be incredibly useful. Whether you'd like to go for an old-school paper list or a planning app that you can download on your phone, keeping detailed lists of tasks you need to accomplish and when youâll work on them will put you in control of how you spend your time.
When working with to-do planning, remember itâs the list that should fit your life, not the other way around. Planning ahead has many benefits, but so does living in the moment. Remember to leave some space for flexibility and plan in downtime when youâre busy. If youâre seeking a sense of confidence in the future, planning around less-than-ideal situations can help you to navigate possible crises more calmly. With time you'll see that checking off all the activities from your list will boost your motivation and give you a greater sense of accomplishment! Another tip you might find useful is to sort out all your tasks and activities into different lists, such as work, home, and personal.
2. Prioritization
If you want to implement your time management, youâll need to know what and how to prioritize. This might not always be easy because some tasks are just as equally important as others. Maybe a good way to learn how to prioritize is to start by completing fast and simple activities and then move on to more complicated or difficult tasks.
Otherwise, another way that can help you understand what to prioritize is to differentiate between urgent and important tasks. As a general rule, you can mark as âUrgentâ all those tasks that require your immediate action. You can then consider 'Important' all those tasks that do matter, but which do not require your immediate attention.
For example:
Answering a call from your boss can be a rather urgent activity
Going to regular check-ins is important but not extremely urgent
3. Task-Batching
If you regularly wrangle a variety of tasks during one working session, task batching is a useful time management strategy for you. This simple planning practice involves merging related tasks together that involve similar solving processes in batches.
Task batching will help you save both time and energy because you reduce the effort of switching between tasks. For example, you can merge activities like answering phone calls, replying to emails, and scheduling meetings into a dedicated time slot for communications.
4. Delegating Tasks
Learning how to delegate effectively is critical to enhancing your time management skills. When you delegate tasks to other team members, you carve out time to focus on the tasks that only you can do. Delegating tasks effectively is a powerful practice for building trust and activating healthy team dynamics in the pursuit of larger organizational goals. If you find yourself delegating tasks on an ad-hoc basis, review the principles of effective delegation or using a tool like a time management matrix can help you to create a streamlined system for handing your tasks off to others.
5. Goal-Setting
Being able to set goals is probably one of the most meaningful steps you need to make if you want to gain more control over your time. Goal-setting allows you to get a clearer picture of where you want to go and the path you need to take in order to get there. So whether you're focusing on setting short-term goals, such as "finish this/that book" to long-term ones, like "achieve this working position", setting goals can give you more clarity and help you stay motivated. And you'll see that with proper planning you're not only gaining more control over your time, but you'll also be able to achieve your dreams and goals at your own pace!
6. Overcoming Procrastination
Procrastination is like an endless loop: when you put off one task, youâre more likely to put off the next task, and then the next, and next⊠and before you know it, you have to deal with a pile of delayed activities that will only make you feel even more overwhelmed.
If youâre in a procrastination spiral, a good way to start to stop procrastination is to alternate dull yet important tasks with chill ones, in order to keep your spirits high and stay on track.
If youâre a method person, try the Pomodoro Technique: With this method, you practice intervals of work with regular breaks to help you zero on what you need to do.
7. Boundary-Setting
Good time management also means that you should overcome the fear of saying ânoâ. And actually, the ability to set your boundaries kind of goes with the idea of prioritization mentioned in the previous point. Are you trying your best to squeeze the usual friends gathering into your schedule but then end up sacrificing your 'me-time'? Or what about that team meeting you could've skipped to carve out more time for your family?
Well if you've found yourself in a similar situation, you might need to start setting your boundaries and learn the fine art of saying ânoâ. If the thought of ânoâ makes you uncomfortable, itâs probably time to start practicing! This simple, powerful response puts you in firmly in the driver seat of how you spend your time. If you find yourself frequently saying âyesâ to the same things, then write them up in an evergreen no-to-do list and keep it next to your to-do list to remind yourself of the boundaries youâve decided to set. Get comfortable saying 'no', because a âyesâ to anything thatâs not really important steals precious time from the things that are more important to you.
8. Single-Tasking (e.g. NOT Multitasking!)
When you have a busy life, itâs easy to fall into the trap of thinking that combining some of the bazillion activities you need to accomplish is a good idea.
(Surprise â itâs not).
When you're multitasking you're splitting your attention between many different tasks, and what's the result? Your productivity and efficiency decrease, but simultaneously your stress levels increase. So no more cooking and replying to important messages at the same time! Multi-tasking is one of the reasons that holiday stress can ruin valuable time with loved ones.
Remember the 1:1:1 rule:
One step at a time
One task at a time
One breath at a time
9. Meeting Deadlines
When you have a task you need to complete you should also make sure you can set a realistic deadline and try your best to stick to it.
Take it as a personal challenge. Try to set a deadline so that you can complete all those tasks that may get in the way. You might find it useful to write your task and the deadline on a sticky note, so you can always keep an eye on your target! Or if you're more into tech you can use time management apps like google calendar that allow you to get a better glance at your tasks and deadlines. Maybe try to also set a subtle alarm that can remind you of the approaching of a specific deadline.
Always remember to reward yourself when you accomplish a task. This will keep you stay focused on your goal and motivated. But also try to keep in mind that these deadlines should be realistic, so don't put too much on your plate!
10. Managing Stress
This might sound like nothing new, but overwhelm isnât always the cause of stress: Mis-managing time is also a major factor in your stress levels. And this, in the long run, can harm your mental health, causing unnecessary stress and anxiety. That's why it can be incredibly crucial to know what can help you manage your stress response. It might be taking a short break between each task, working out, stretching, meditating, or listening to some music, just find what really works for you!