Time Management
Top 5 tips to Better Manage Your Time:
- Set clear goals
- Setting clear goals comes through creating your schedule, prioritizing various tasks, and being realistic. As mentioned later, people have a tendency to overestimate their ability to complete tasks and often plan around an idealized version in their minds. It’s important to set clear and attainable goals for yourself as to not overwhelm yourself with a longer and longer list of unfinished tasks, but to also slowly but surely mark things off the list.
- Prioritize tasks and create a schedule
- It’s great to create to-do lists to increase efficiency, but as the list starts to increase this can get very overwhelming. It’s important to take some time to properly set out the tasks for the time period and also prioritize tasks that need to be done immediately as opposed to in the near future. In prioritizing tasks, it’s often better to start with the most difficult tasks first, the one most likely to be put off till the end because distractions inevitably get in the way.
- Avoid procrastinating
- Create realistic timelines. Everyone often overestimates their capacity to finish tasks. To avoid procrastination, it’s important to work on self-discipline with break times but also to be realistic with your schedule. Adding time buffers in between tasks will allow you to stick to your overall schedule even if one individual task goes over the allotted time.
- Take short breaks to avoid burnout
- There are various techniques online for time management, such as the Pomodoro technique. It’s important to first off avoid going onto non-work related sites during the hours you are completing a task and keeping your phone out of reach until it’s time for a break. However, when on break, self-discipline will be your best friend. Part of sticking to your tentative schedule involves ending break times when scheduled instead of falling into the cycle of procrastination.
- Break large tasks into smaller steps
- Similar to how a larger to-do list becomes more overwhelming, the larger a task, the more stressful it becomes in the moment. By taking a large task and breaking it down into smaller steps of their own, you can go through these tasks in a list-form while reducing the amount of stress or anxiety with the overall desired goal. Batch-processing also plays a role. Through grouping similar tasks together to be done in the same time period, you can more efficiently complete an objective in a given time slot.