Have you ever wondered how your day went by so fast? Ever wished for more hours in a day? Have you ever felt the guilt of not being able to fulfill all your goals? Most of us have. However, if the answer is yes for most of your days, then you probably need to focus on optimal time management. Time management basically refers to optimizing your use of time in such a way that you are able to perform all your tasks in an efficient manner. It is a coordinating activity. However, if you are not good at it, you will lose valuable opportunities.
“Time is not the main thing. It’s the only thing.“
Miles Davis
Why is time management so important?
Optimal time management is one of the most valuable skills you need in your professional life. Yet nobody teaches you how to manage time in an efficient way!
Here are 5 reasons why you need to be a very good time manager:
- To maintain your peace of mind: There is so much to do and so little time. If you are unable to manage time, you will probably be busy throughout the day and yet not be able to achieve targets. The constant cognitive load will not allow you to live in peace.
- Higher productivity: One of the most prominent measures of work appraisal is productivity. You might have creative ideas and excellent degrees. However, if your productivity is low, you will not progress in your career. Efficient time management allows you to be highly productive.
- Work-life balance: All of us juggle between home and office. If you are a poor time manager, you will have to sacrifice one domain for the sake of the other. In the worst case, you will end up being poor at both the domains. Time management skills will help you have a better balance.
- Health: Cognitive burden and stress have a high correlation with physical health. Hence, poor time management skills will lead to poorer physical health too.
- Professional reputation: Your image and reputation in your office is a strong predictor of growth opportunities. This is because optimal time management is a desirable skill in executive positions. If you are perceived as a poor time manager, you will probably not be considered for higher positions.
8 Techniques for optimal time management
There is nothing to feel disheartened about if you are not a good time manager. This is because you can easily pick up the skill anytime if you are motivated enough. You may try out the following techniques:
Time Blocking
Most people are inefficient time managers because they are unorganized. Instead of finishing a task they began, they do bits and pieces of everything throughout the day. If that works for you, then great. However, most of the time, it does not work. You end up in a lot of clutter-both literally and metaphorically. Your days may end with you sitting on a pile of books and files and your brain juggling between unfinished tasks. There is scientific evidence that if you do not complete a task you began, you will experience unpleasant feelings (Zeigarnik Effect).
In order to avoid unpleasant feelings and unfinished tasks, you may use time blocking. Time blocking is nothing but allocating specific times of the day to specific tasks. Let us assume that you have 10 tasks to do in a day. One way to go about it is to perform each task whenever you feel like doing it. Some people can reach up to the 10th task, but most cannot. In this case, if you allocate specific times of the day for each task, you are more likely to be aware of each of them and also have a higher chance of completing all.
Regular sleep schedule
Almost all positive habits you can think of have some relationship to healthy sleep habits. Optimal management of time is no exception. Maintain a regular sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. This will enable you to pinpoint your exact waking hours. You can use this data about your waking hours to plan your activities.
On the contrary, if you sleep whenever you feel sleepy, you will not know what your waking hours are. Hence, your day will not be well-planned. Maintaining a regular sleep cycle can also help fight other problems like insomnia and digestive disorders.
Determine your most productive hours
Self-awareness is key to developing all positive habits. You need to be aware of when you are at the peak of your productivity. Many people will suggest you rise up early in the morning and do your most important tasks in the morning. However, many people are not morning persons and their productivity is definitely not at its peak even if they have risen early.
Do not push yourself to be a morning person. Instead, use your natural instincts and energy. If you are more productive during afternoons, evenings, or nights, there is no problem. Do your most demanding and most complex tasks in your most productive hours.
However, you need to maintain regularity in your sleeping habits and also ensure that you sleep for at least 7-9 hours. Additionally, do not force yourself to stay awake till late at night, especially if you work morning shifts or have kids who attend morning school.
Do not multi-task
You may have heard many people take pride in saying that they have superior intellect because they can multi-task. Do not trust them. Multi-tasking has nothing to do with intelligence. Rather, it has been shown to hinder productivity and performance. If you have adopted time blocking, you will never need to multi-task unless there is an emergency.
Multi-tasking reduces performance in both tasks. Let me explain why. We all have a limited pool of cognitive energy. Imagine going shopping with a bag full of money. As you buy things, you spend the money and the bag becomes emptier. If you spend too much, buying clothes, there will be no money left when you enter the grocery store and you may need to compromise. In order to purchase your full list of groceries, you may need to go back home to get more money. Similarly, we all have a fixed pool of cognitive resources. If we are doing multiple tasks at the same time, the allocation of cognitive resources might not be uniform. You may end up using more resources on a task at the cost of the other one you are doing at the same time.
Instead of working this way, you may consider doing one task at a time and taking a 2-minute breather before you proceed for the next.
Control your need for perfection
Many times, we cannot complete tasks on time because we have a strong and over-arching need for perfection. The desire to do your job well is not right. Instead, it is a very positive attitude. However, if you just cannot hit the send button because you want to write an even better email or cannot shut down your computer because you want to make the presentation a bit better, you may be over-reacting.
The efficient way is always to create a balance. Set optimal quality standards which are non-negotiable. However, do not go overboard. If you think that you are unable to judge the quality of your work, you may seek external validation from peers and family.
How do you know if you are demanding excessive perfection? You just need a social comparison. Compute the average duration your colleagues are taking for doing similar work and see their level of quality. If you take more time than the average, you probably need to check for perfectionist tendencies in you. Please keep in mind that if you can live up to the level of perfection without compromising on time management, you need not worry. It may mean that you are an excellent worker.
Delegate for optimal time management
You may not be good at time management simply because you do not delegate work and try to chew too much. Your office work is not likely to be a one-person job. Hence, you need to delegate work to others.
Some reasons why you do not want to delegate work are your desire for perfection, lack of trust in your team, Type A personality, and many more. You may engage in introspection to find out why you are not able to delegate work. After that, you may work on those problem areas.
Avoid procrastination
Procrastination is one of the reasons for poor time management. However, the two are not exactly the same. You may read our articles on the psychology of procrastination and ways to overcome procrastination.
Digital tools
- You may wish to play online time management games. Click here to play.
- There are many time management Apps. Go through the list here.
Also, remember that you may not ever be perfect in time management. Utilize your time spent in the best way possible. For example, even if you idle away your time in gaming, it is still useful. You can learn some management lessons from Asphalt Legends. Similarly, you can learn motor skills and have faster response time from First-Person-Shooting or FPS games.
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