If you are amongst the individuals who feel that they have wasted their entire day, then welcome to the cult. You are definitely not alone. With the rising technological use in our daily lives, we are getting prone to time wastage. Whether it is in the form of excessive use of social media or simple browsing over the internet, we usually don’t track time, and the end
How to manage time?
In this article, I am going to focus on some of the strategies that you can use for managing your time wisely along with the discussion on some of the tools that can keep you away from wasting time. Let’s start with some of the strategies that can help you in finding the answer to how to manage your time wisely.
A. Time management strategies:
Why do you think you end up wasting all your precious time? Its because you don’t enjoy what you do. You find other things whether it is scrolling a social media forum or watching general videos, interesting and important. Keeping this specific situation under consideration, here are a few time management tips that can be helpful.
1. Motivate yourself
There are times when you are least interested in doing work. It can be because of a boring task or simple lack of interest. So, in order to concentrate on what you need to do, you’ll have to keep yourself motivated. You’ll need to focus on the ultimate objective that you want to achieve. It will help you in keeping your motivation high and thus resulting in better concentration and timely completion of work.
2. Prioritize your tasks
You might have a number of tasks to perform in a single day. Thinking about them won’t help you finish them, you’ll have to prioritize them in order to manage your time efficiently. Select the tasks that are sensitive or have higher overall importance. You can even select your own basis for prioritizing. But doing so will help you in higher chances of keeping up your tasks according to the time.
3. Have self-control
It is important that you must exhibit self-control. There are times when you need to have self-control in order to give each task the right importance and place. Thus, you can achieve time management while exhibiting self-control.
4. Use Technology
You can use technology in order to plan, organize and optimize your activities. There are multiple tools available to help you with it. It is better than you should find the right tool for this purpose and ensure that it does not require much of your time. Otherwise, there won’t be any purpose of using tools.
5. Reduce the impact of time wasters
One of the biggest time waster in our lives nowadays is or a mobile phone. It gets worse with an internet connection. Isn’t it? I would recommend to keep it aside while you are working. You might go for switching it off. But if you think this is being too harsh, you can at least expect to keep it on the silent mode. And yes don’t forget to place it upside down. Otherwise, all your effort would be wasted. That’s a personal experience. You might disagree.
6. Multi-tasking must be avoided
If you are really looking to have effective time management, then it is advised that you must avoid any sort of multi-tasking. Our brains are not designed to work on a number of tasks at the same time. It results in requiring more time for the completion of every task which could have been done in lesser time. If you still think, you can multi-task, make sure to keep an account of the time required to complete a task when you are handling two or more tasks together. Compare them with the time required for the completion of the individual task. And you can have a better view of your abilities.
7. Procrastination can lead to problems
If you are in the habit of delaying everything and keeping it to the last minute, then it will be difficult for you to manage time. Usually, the things done on the 11th hour require even more time than the normal time for such tasks. Thus, you’ll have to leave this habit of yours’, if you are serious about knowing how to manage your time.
8. Concentrate on your health
Last but not the least and probably the most irrelevant while discussing how to manage time is to give special focus on your health. If you won’t be healthy. You won’t feel like doing anything. And then expect delays and time wastage as part of your life. In order to avoid such ills, it is important to have healthy meals, proper sleep, and a hydrated body.
B. Time management tools:
As this is an era of technology, so in this part of the article, I am going to highlight a few tools that can actually help you in managing time. Apart from the tools, there is a special way of managing time-bound activities, i.e. time boxing. I am going to summarize it in this section as well.
1. Forest Application
It is an application, which can help you in keeping your focus on a particular task while keeping your mobile phone away from you. All you need to do is install this application. Open it and plant a virtual tree when you want your phone not to disturb you. In this application, it takes time for the tree to grow. If you’ll open any other application while using Forest, your forest will destroy. Although it might seem funny. But once you’ll start to grow your forest, you’ll see how it impacts your psychology, and you’ll keep your phone away. Thus, concentrate on the task.
2. Trello
Another important tool that can answer your question of how to manage time wisely is Trello. It is an application to help you especially if you are working in a team. You can assign projects, mark the completed once, create a to-do list, add notes to a particular task. It is an easier application to note the status of a particular idea or task. So, it is one of the important time management tools that you can use to keep you organized.
3. Wunderlist
It is another important tool to help you in setting a priority list and noting all your tasks. So that you would be able to give each of them the due time and won’t forget any of it. The best part of this application is that you can even create subcategories of certain main categories. So, that there is no ambiguity whether it is your grocery list or purchasing books, you can record each of the items.
4. Time Boxing
This is a manual tool; you can simply allocate specific time for each of the activity that is planning to complete in a day. Once you have started the application of this technique, you’ll have to follow the timeline. In case one of the activities is not finished in the set time, you must move to the next and then reschedule the left one on the next day. Obviously, such a technique cannot work if you have time-sensitive tasks at hand, but for the others, you can give it a try.
C. Time Management tips:
Apart from the discussion on time management techniques and time management tools, here I am going to discuss the time management tips for you. Going through these tips can provide you with a handy response to the question of how to manage time.
- Plan your activities in a way to cover all the activities
- Developed a priority list for all your activities
- Implement time boxing technique where you can
- Organize your self and your work to get the best out of it in the specific time
- Use technology to boost your performance but limit the distracting elements of technology as much as you can.
- Don’t go for multitasking unless you really require it
- Implement self-control, and you can excel in managing tim
With all this information, you can expect to improve your time management ability. These time management techniques, time management tools and time management tips would remain unachievable until you’ll put your part of the effort. You’ll have to implement these points in your life to figure out the combination that works best for you. In the end, it is going to be you who is going to answer the question of how to manage time wisely, in the most efficient manner, keeping your task under consideration.
