Time Management Tips To Work Less and Do More

Do you feel the need to be more organized and/or more productive? Do you spend waste your day without achieving anything and then wonder why you haven't accomplished much? These time management tips are for you—they'll help you increase your productivity and stay cool and focus on your daily activities.

Time is precious, particularly when it comes to running a small business and daily life activities. Yet there are never more than 24 hours in a day. Some entrepreneurs respond to this fact of life with focus and purpose. Others freak out.

Are you in the latter group? You don’t have to be. With the right approach, you can work efficiently, productively, and relatively stress-free.

Here are the time management tips:

Find out what that is using your Time:

Many of us are prey to time-wasters that steal time we could be using much more productively. What are your time stealers? Do you spend too much time 'net surfing, reading email, Facebook posting, texting, or making personal calls?

Are you a time waster? Tracking Daily Activities explains how to track your activities so you can form an accurate picture of how much time you spend on various activities, the first step to effective time management.

Create time management goals.

Make sure you’re engaging in activities that support your business goals, both short- and long-term. Everything else is a potential time-waster. Your daily plan should revolve around working on tasks and activities that directly relate to generating income and growing your business.

Remember, the focus of time management is actually changing your behaviours, not changing time. A good place to start is by eliminating your personal time-wasters. For one week, for example, set a goal that you're not going to take personal phone calls or respond to non-work related text messages while you're working. (See Set Specific Goals for help with goal setting.) For a fun look at behaviours that can interfere with successful time management

Eliminate distractions.

Start paying attention to the number of times someone interrupts you when you’re in the midst of an important task. Track self-induced interruptions, too, particularly those of the social media variety. Your Smartphone is extremely useful, but it’s also addictive and among the most insidious time-wasters known to mankind.

It may take a massive exercise in willpower, but shut the door and turn off your phone to maximize your time. Instead of being “always on,” plan a break in the day to catch up on email, call people back, talk with staff, etc.

Use time management tools (APP or Software).

Whether it's a Day-Timer, a software program or a phone app, the first step to physically managing your time is to know where it's going now and planning how you're going to spend your time in the future. A software program such as Outlook, for instance, lets you schedule events easily and can be set to remind you of events in advance, making your time management easier.

Prioritize wisely.

Looking at what goes into making up your day, where do your activities fit into these categories?

Write down your three or four “important and urgent” tasks that must be addressed today. As you complete each one, check it off your list. This will provide you with a sense of accomplishment and can motivate you to tackle less essential items.

You should start each day with a session prioritizing the tasks for that day and setting your performance benchmark. If you have 20 tasks for a given day, how many of them do you truly need to accomplish? For more on daily planning and prioritizing daily tasks,

Establish routines

Establish routines and stick to them as much as possible.

While crises will arise, you'll be much more productive if you can follow routines most of the time. For most people, creating and following a routine lets them get right down to the tasks of the day rather than frittering away time getting started.

Get a Plan.

One of the worst things you can do is jump into the workday with no clear idea about what needs to get done. The time you spend thinking ahead and planning your activities is trivial compared with the time you’ll lose jumping from one thing to the next (and rarely completing anything). Depending on your personality, try one of these options:

•  The night before — At the end of the day, take 15 minutes to clear your desk and put together a list of the next day’s most pressing tasks. It’s a great decompression technique, and you’ll feel better sitting down at a clean desk in the morning.

•  First thing in the morning — Arrive a few minutes early and assemble your prioritized to-do list This may prove to be the most productive part of your day.

Conclusion

Remember you are great and you can do it, move on and do more and achieve more