How to Choose The Right Time Management Technique for You

Time, they say, is the one commodity you always spend and will never be able to actually buy. You can’t save it up, and every morning your balance goes back to zero. Yet every second counts — in athletics, the difference between winning and total obscurity can be in the tenths of seconds.

While you’ll never be able to get more time, by using strategies in time management you can organize your time more effectively so as to create opportunities to take advantage of additional time in your life. If you spend this extra time wisely you can do wonderful things like, expand your career, deepen your relationships, and have a chance to invest in hobbies or philanthropy that can change your life and the lives of others. All this can be achieved by an investment in time management.

If you have trouble with executing good time management habits it might be comforting to know you are not the only one. A huge volume of people considers themselves deficient when it comes to managing their time. Still others think that because they are always busy, it means they are managing their time effectively, but this can be misleading. Just because you have a full schedule does not mean you are using your time wisely. In fact, it might mean the opposite.

Some Indications of Poor Time Management

If you are not sure if you need to find ways to be more organized with your time, there are a number of signs of inefficient time management that you may want to consider.

• A lack of punctuality: Again, just because you are always on the go doesn’t mean you are using time well. If you find that you are perennially late, it is a sign that you need to learn to prioritize your time more effectively.
• Performing your work too quickly: You can often tell when taking on too many tasks makes your work mediocre across the board. When you take the time to assess your work and work habits you can more easily demonstrate the quality of work that you aspire to.
• Impatience with others: If you feel you are often very impatient with a number of coworkers, you may have to look at yourself to find the root of the problem. Often a tendency towards impatience is a result of your not having used your own time as well as you could have and now being placed in a time crunch.
• A lack of clarity when it comes to goals: If you haven’t taken the time to consider your goals properly, the output of your work will suffer and things can be sloppy and feel ambiguous. Making sure you have a clear mission and set of aspirations. This will allow everyone to work toward an end goal that makes sense and is consistent.
• Doing assignments at the last minute: Procrastinating is another symptom of poor time management. It causes undue stress and may be an indication of the fact that you do not know how best to prioritize your time.
• Working too hard: If you find yourself constantly exhausted, it may be a time management issue. Are you taking on too many projects that you should be saying no to? Are you using the time you have efficiently? If you expend more energy than necessary on unimportant tasks, it may cause you to over extend yourself on the actions that really matter.
• Overpreparation and micromanagement: When asked that question about strengths and weaknesses in your job interview, many people choose to say that they’re biggest flaw is that they are a perfectionist. This might be more of an issue than you think when it comes to how it reflects on your time management skills. By spending too much time obsessing over preparation or on small, sometimes less meaningful, details you may expend time that you simply don’t have to achieve the same result that you would have with less stress. Using your time wisely would allow you to get more done and avoid “perfectionism”.
• Not being able to make decisions: If you find you have a hard time making choices, it is likely because you haven’t taken the initial time to understand what your goals should be. If you had the opportunity to use your time more effectively, it would make you less indecisive as you would be able to see how one decision leads you further toward a larger goal.
• An inability to delegate properly: If you find that you are constantly saying the phrase “If you want something done right… you have to do it yourself”, the problem might be with you. Taking on tasks that others could perform for you is caused by a lack of time management skill. The ability to assess your tasks and determine which need you to accomplish them and which could be given to others is an imperative one if you are going to be generally more efficient. If you need to take the time to coordinate your work or train others, this is time that is well-spent.

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Time management strategies that work

Before looking at time management tricks and tips that may help you conceptualize your tasks and time in a way that allows you to be more efficient, it is imperative to consider an overview of how you might better prepare to engage with time management strategies.

• Slow down: If you are constantly busy you make bristle at the idea that slowing down will actually allow you to use your time more efficiently. However, if you fill your time with remaining organized rather than plowing forward, you will save yourself time in the long run. Are you one of those people that has an overcrowded desktop or disorganized inbox, for example? By taking the time to sort emails as they come in or making sure files go in the folders that make sense, you will save yourself huge volumes of time in the long run.
• Stop multitasking: It’s proven that multitasking is a misnomer. By attempting to do multiple things simultaneously you end up being inefficient at all of them. The “myth” of multitasking is that by performing tasks at the same time you can get more done in a hurry, but the truth is that your brain needs time to adjust when switching between tasks. If you spent that time focused on one thing, you would more easily accomplish what you want to do.
• Work smarter, not longer: There’s a finite amount of time that you can be effective at work. After a certain number of hours, pressing on is less efficient and can be damaging to other work you are trying to do down the line. Some people think that by pulling all-nighters and burning the midnight oil they can get more work done, but the truth is that by spending less time when you are focused, you can accomplish much more.
• Take more breaks: Many people work through lunch breaks or any breaks in order to try to get more done. However, taking regular breaks has been shown to boost productivity as well as creativity.
• Avoid distractions: These days there are more distractions than ever. Social media can easily become a time sink hole that leads to time loss of hours per day. Checking the news during your work day is another way that you can lose precious time. Texting or messaging has the immediate gratification that comes with instant communication, but it is at the expense of your efficiency. Instead of spending that time erratically, when you should be focused on work, find ways to limit your distractions. Apps that control your social media use are useful and shutting down things like push notifications on your computer or phone can help keep you on track. One way to be more efficient is to give yourself a specific allotted time outside of work to handle texting, emails, and other errands that are not work-related.

Over the years, many people have developed effective tricks and strategies to jumpstart their ability to be more efficient with their time.

Visualizations for Improved Time Management:

For some people, simply conceptualizing their tasks in a more visual way allows them to be more efficient.

• The 80/20 rule: The concept of the 80/20 rule is one that goes back to Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto said that 20% of your actions are the cause of 80% of outcomes. With this idea in mind, Pareto introduced a way to analyze your tasks in order to move forward more efficiently. The step by step process goes like this:
• List your tasks and any issues that you are having performing them
• Look at the root cause of any trouble you have performing a task, i.e. you aren’t getting things done because you have too many projects
• Assign a numerical value to each problem that you have based on their level of importance
• Bundle your problems based on similarities in root cause
• Add up the bundles and see which has the highest number (giving it the highest priority) and work to fix that root cause first, traveling down the line of highest to lowest priority

What this accomplishes is a new way to look at your problems, boiling them down to metrics so you have a direction when it comes to focusing your energy on solving them. It also makes you sit down and consider the prioritization of your tasks, which is a crucial exercise in time management.

• The Eisenhower Matrix: Prior to becoming President, then General Dwight D. Eisenhower had to make many large-scale decisions quickly. In order to accomplish this efficiently, he created a method of task visualization that allowed him to easily see what he needed to accomplish next.
• Eisenhower created four quadrants delineated under the headings of urgent or not urgent and important or unimportant
• Tasks deemed urgent and important were handled immediately
• Those he saw as not urgent but still important were put on his back burner
• Issues that were urgent but less important could be delegated to someone else
• Finally, tasks that were both seen to be not urgent and unimportant could be abandoned completely

Again the benefit is in the idea of conceptualizing tasks within a visual matrix. By having a way to literally map out his decision making process, Eisenhower was able to more easily prioritize his time.

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Time Organization Patterning

By looking at time differently, some people have found they can get more done in shorter spans.

• Time blocking: Considering a schedule as set amounts or units of time allows for improved time management. However, the process still relies on being able to consider your tasks beforehand and assess how much time you want to allot for each. Time blocking works when you:
• Create a digital or physical calendar and separate it into time units of 30 minute chunks
• Decide how long each of your tasks will take
• Assign specific chunks to each task
• Make sure to allot break times between chunks to refocus

This allows for specific focus and gives the practitioner the need to finish a task in a set amount of time.

• Parkinson’s Law

Cyril Northcote Parkinson put forth the theory that a task will take just as long as the amount of time you have scheduled for it. In other words, if you give yourself a week to accomplish something you almost never will have it done sooner than that. With that in mind, changing your conception of your schedule can force you to be more efficient with your time. There are many ways to use this concept to help with time management, for example:

• Consider a relatively generous timeline for a project, then cut it in half
• Use an egg timer to give yourself only a set amount of time to accomplish something that could fill you with distractions, like answering emails
• If something is due in the evening, get it done in the morning
• Try working with a physical deadline like use your laptop without a power charger and give yourself only as much time as the battery charge will allow.

These are just a few of the many tips and tricks that exist that will give you improved understanding of how to manage your time. Whether you prefer visualizations, to-do lists or reframing your concept of time you will find ways to adjust your thinking that allow you to create a better schedule, leading to a better overall life and career.

Author bio: Sierra Skelly is a writer from San Diego, where she helps create engaging content for companies like USA.edu. When she isn’t writing on the latest productivity hacks, you can find her reading at the beach or hiking.