Top 17 Time Management Habits
I see everyone doing wrong and here are the right practices.
I want to share my top 17 tips to grow your time management skills. Without any further ado, let’s get into it.
1. Perfectionists work hard to produce high-quality work. Their strict standards eventually lead to stress, exhaustion, and worry.
Actionable step: Learn to accept imperfections. Ask yourself: “Am I working effectively? Can I do more with a few imperfect tasks?”
Review your progress every week, two weeks, and at the end of each month.
Request assistance and insights from the people around you. To find out if you are performing well and if the present quality of your job is sufficient, talk to someone with more experience (in a work setting, that’s your supervisor).
2. When your mind keeps wandering, every task takes way more time.
But trust me, you’re not alone in this. We all are in the same boat.
Actionable step: At which part of the day do you feel most productive and energetic? The most crucial tasks should be completed during your peak productivity period. We can do tasks 10 times faster and more accurately at these times.
Find the hour of the day when you are most motivated and enthusiastic. It can be the morning, afternoon, or night.
Remember to take pauses as well!
These will help you to clear your thoughts, replenish your mental resources, regain your motivation, and lessen decision fatigue.
Also, spend less time on social media. Your focus and attention span are reduced by social media and search engines. Engage in single-tasking. Utilize task timers.
3. A never-ending cycle of duties can be demoralizing, stressful, depressing, and exhausting.
Actionable step: Make six-item lists for every day, arranged in order of importance. As you finish each item, move it to the top of the list for the next day. Narrow down the tasks on your list. Set the tasks that will yield the best results as priorities.
4. Without vision, you can’t produce the outcomes you want, which makes it difficult to maintain your enthusiasm and delight.
Actionable step: Get a bird’s eye perspective. Consider how the tasks you have at hand can help you reach your personal or professional objectives. Keep your attention on the timeline.
Determine the time wasters and energy draining things in your life. Focus on the things that matter and stop doing the things that don’t advance you. Make a strategy for emergencies.
Be ready for the worst-case scenarios.
5. Persistent stress can be harmful to your health and performance.
Actionable step: Determine what stresses you out. Keep a journal, and look for stress management techniques. Create healthy coping mechanisms for stress, such as regular exercise, yoga, meditation, hobbies, and quality sleep. Establish boundaries and be clear about it.
To acquire a broad overview of your efforts, review not only your daily and weekly results, but also your monthly and half-year progress.
Keep a record of your goals and plans, as well as the skills you wish to master. To make sure you stay on track, periodically review your progress.
6. Set short-term goals and cultivate a strategic mindset to accomplish amazing achievements.
Actionable step: Increase your awareness. Consider how the time and work you put in today will shape tomorrow’s world.
Follow the seven-minute rule! Spend 7 minutes planning your day in the morning and 7 minutes reviewing your day and creating a plan for tomorrow before you go to bed.
Examine your development. To gauge your progress, consult reports, tables, and charts.
7. A more strategic approach to time management is encouraged by the surprising trends and insights that time monitors.
Actionable step: A timesheet app, a desktop time tracker, a mobile app, a browser plugin, or a stopwatch timer are your options for time tracking software.
Record all minor tasks, including phone calls, meetings, coffee breaks, and distraction time. Regularly review your performance using charts and reports.
8. You need to develop awareness of your brain state and deliberately change it to one that will suit you best.
Actionable step: Organize your surroundings. Tell people you’re trying to focus. Examine your attention-grabbing tendencies. Identify and get rid of background noise (like TV and phone notifications).
To increase your focus and memory, eliminate daydreaming, and increase mental acuity, engage in exercise and meditation.
9. As humans, we all have a 24-hour day and a certain amount of energy.
Actionable step: Outsource. Consider the opportunity costs, lighten your load, and concentrate on high-impact tasks. Automate and delegate tasks as much as you can.
10. Most of us tend to underestimate how long it will take us to complete activities and projects.
Actionable step: Create a list of tasks, set the time, and monitor your progress. Then, multiply the result by 100% after adding up all of your time spent and dividing it by the whole expected time.
Assume things will go south. Estimates should account for any delays and obstacles. Have someone else create the estimate —they can be ruthlessly sincere in a way you cannot.
11. Making the most of your productive time can help you achieve your goals and reduce your anxiety and unease during busy times.
Actionable step: If a new task comes up, do it now, delegate, or eliminate it.
Use the 1–3–5 method. Each day, commit to 1 major task, 3 secondary tasks, and 5 minor chores. Set up agile outcomes: focus on achieving 3 main goals throughout a week, month, or year.
Improve your technical abilities as well! You need both hard and soft skills to get ahead in life.
Review your talents frequently, consider how to enhance them, and consider what other skills you may use.
Know your equipment. Be more mindful of how you interact with others, communicate, pick up new skills, cope with change, and resolve disagreements.
12. Learn how to efficiently handle emails, notifications, and low-priority tasks.
Actionable step: Set boundaries. Make time for calls and emails, and let people know when you’re available.
Say no more often. Stay away from team chatter and put off low-importance activities. Set aside time for deep work, self-care activities, and guilt-free periods.
13. Habits are routines you perform with little to no conscious thinking, which also entails little energy expenditure.
Actionable step: Create a habit loop. Select a trigger, carry out the procedure, and then enjoy.
- Imagine you have a standup meeting at 10 a.m. (trigger).
- You then turn off alerts, put on your headphones, and begin working on the most difficult assignment (routine).
- When you are finished, you stop thinking about it and go out to do something else.
14. Regardless of what we do, most of our tasks are monotonous and can be automated.
Actionable step: Brainstorm ideas to handle your normal tasks even more efficiently by regularly reviewing them. Use software and tools to automate repetitive processes. Utilize Zapier and IFTTT to automate tasks in your online apps.
15. Commit to 3 to 5 things maximum. Anything that goes above these boundaries is quite likely to lose its hold on your brain.
Actionable step: To free up your thoughts, use external storage such as organizers, notes, and task apps. When you are brainstorming and discussing ideas, use collaboration tools.
Make simple, routine decisions. Reduce the number of decisions you make daily to save mental energy.
16. Large tasks might seem daunting, which causes stress and delays.
Actionable step: Break it down. Every time you begin a new activity, divide it into smaller chunks that you can finish in 20 to 30 minutes. Create a sensible order and finish each task one by one.
Regularly assess your progress. Break large tasks into smaller chunks. Track your progress, and utilize task management systems like Kanban.
17. On the one hand, our lifestyle is continuously becoming digital, which decreases our attention span to that of a goldfish. On the other hand, AI is making leaps and bounds. This gives us loads of tools and software to automate. And if you utilize them properly, current tools may save you a lot of time.
Actionable step:
Plan your day using technology. I use Notion for my content bank and dump all my thoughts, to-do lists, and other stuff.
Set precise, tough, and difficult goals by the goal-setting principle. Review your future goals. Even if you aren’t enthusiastic about your current task, a long-term viewpoint could give you the drive to continue.
Trick your brain’s reward system. Dopamine, which is related to pleasure and motivation, is released in your brains whenever your complete a task. To keep yourself motivated when working on lengthy projects, divide your duties into manageable goals.
Final Thoughts
I hope these techniques and steps help you in your routine. It took me a lot of time to figure them out! Please clap for good karma and follow my medium page for more insights.
As always, thanks for reading!
