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Tips for Honing Your Time Management Skills and Organizing Your Work Life

How to Hone Your Time Management Skills and Organize Your Work Life

Here are some tips to help you overcome your problems and hone your time management skills at work.

Plunge Into It

The worst thing you can do for your productivity is procrastinating at the beginning of the workday. If you don’t plunge straight into work at the start, you’ll have a much harder time starting later. We all know the saying — well begun is half done!

What’s more, as time goes by, you’ll keep losing your focus, and it will only get more difficult to do anything later. So whenever you want to leave a task for later, remember that no matter how poor your focus is now, it is not getting any better.

Set SMART Goals

Before you start working, first, you need to set goals for the workday. But you need to be highly specific as to what you need to get done. So your goals should be SMART:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Time-bound

So instead of setting vague goals, such as, “I will work harder today,” be specific as to what exactly you need to do today. What particular task do you need to tick off the list?

Prioritize

Focusing on small and easily doable tasks you can leave for later while avoiding the complicated project whose deadline is nearing is just another form of procrastination. You’re not helping yourself by ignoring the elephant in the room.

So you need to learn how to prioritize. It’s best to do your deep work first and leave the easiest work last instead of doing the opposite. In other words, think about the biggest nuisance you need to deal with today and focus on that first.

Organize Your Workstation

Clutter is proven to give us anxiety and heighten our stress levels. So a disorganized workstation means a disorganized mind. If you want to feel in control and be better able to focus on your work, make sure your environment is neatly organized. Remove anything unnecessary and don’t let coffee mugs loiter around for too long.

If you want to take it up a notch, you can even try to feng shui your workstation and see how it works out for you.

Delegate

Maybe the reason you can’t finish your tasks on time is that you have too much on your plate, and it’s just not doable, no matter how efficient you are. Consider your core responsibilities and delegate everything else if possible.

If you spend more time fixing your website than dealing with customers, hire a web designer. If you’re overwhelmed with administrative work, get an assistant. If you can’t focus on your business’ core services because you spend hours worrying about your vehicles, outsource your fleet management. It’s that simple.

Take Scheduled Breaks

You’re much less likely to take “wild” and unpredictable breaks if you schedule them in advance. It’s best to plan for breaks after completing coherent chunks of work and not at random. This will give you a sense of achievement and encourage you to truly savor your time off, knowing you’ve completed something important.

You can have many short, ten-minute breaks and plan a longer one for lunch. You can allow yourself that luxury if you really spend all the time in-between working.

Remove Any Distractions

The number one enemy of getting things done are our smartphones. It’s so easy to get distracted and lose focus if you keep getting messages in a group chain or notifications from social media. So put your phone away, and check it only during your breaks.

There can be other distractions as well, most commonly, your colleagues. Ask them not to bother you unless it’s something extremely important.