Seven Time Management Techniques That Actually Work!

Time management Techniques

Time is a dimension that needs to be tamed. It is a resource that you should put to work, instead of working for it. With a little effort, some changes to your lifestyle, and careful planning you can control time. I am sharing these 7 most powerful time management techniques to boost productivity. Stay with me!!

Wake Up Early

Waking up early itself is a powerful time management technique. When you wake up early, you make time and use it for productive activities. Besides being healthy, walking up early gives you time to plan you day properly beforehand so that you can set goals for the day. As you keep accomplishing those goals, you feel motivated. So, walk up early and take 10 minutes to plan your day, this will prevent you from fumbling the whole day and you will and be in control.

Prioritize Activities

Use the ‘CURL’ method. Curl stands for Critical, Urgent, Routine and Long Term. Here is how CURL can help you prioritize your daily activities.

Critical – Those activities that cannot be postponed or avoided because the hell will break loose if you do so should be classified as critical and must be finished first. This will give you a lot of peace of mind and space.
Urgent – Some activities must be done within a frame of time to ensure their outcome does not deteriorate over time. Such activities should be treated as urgent and must not be procrastinated. For example, if you have examinations coming up the next week, then the later you start preparing for the exam, the lesser will be your grades, so treat preparation for examination as an urgent activity.
Routine – Routine activities are the activities which must be done regularly, either daily, weekly, or monthly. They can also be urgent or critical sometimes, but we are classifying them as routine because you will anyways do them without putting much of an effort or thought. For example, sending your car for servicing every three months or dropping your kids to school every day. There is no extra planning required to do these activities because these activities are fixed, and they have their own fixed time slots. All the other activities must be planned around these activities
Long Term – Some activities that are to be accomplished over a long period of time are called long term activities. Example- mowing the lawn, planning your annual health check-up, vacuuming the carpets and so on. While prioritizing your daily activities, if these don’t fit into a particular day’s schedule, move them over to a less busy day. However, you should include them in your scheduler and if they are not finished on the planned day, carry them forward to another day without forgetting.

Follow Routines

Create routines for the day like the Monday routine, the Tuesday routine, the weekend routine etc. When you make routines, you need not put any extra effort to carry out the activities included in those routines. Due to the repetitive nature of routines, most of the activities listed therein are carried out by your subconscious and you don’t have to make a conscious effort to finish them. For example, if must visit an orphanage every Wednesday at 10:30 AM to greet the children, then instead of having to remember it every week and planning for it repeatedly, put it in your Wednesday routine. When you do so, you will get used to it after two three weeks and then you don’t have to worry about making time or planning the visit every time. By now you have already made provisions for this activity in terms of time and other planning. You even know the traffic pattern at this time and day of the week and everyone at the office is also aware of your routine, so no need to request time off for this activity separately.

Avoid Distractions

When you start doing something, give your 100% to it rather than thinking about something else or looking somewhere else and trying to do it because this way you will only prolong the duration of carrying out that activity. Instead, when you sit down to accomplish some task put your full concentration and do the task so that there will be no wasteful revisions or and you will be able to accomplish your tasks in time or before time

Use a Scheduler

No one is a superhuman who is able to remember everything. It is always advisable to use a scheduler, whether physical or digital, to help you keep track of all your activities and ensure that you do not miss out on any critical or urgent tasks. The scheduler takes so much of load off your mind and lets you focus on the day without having to constantly recall what needed to be done next. With a free mind, you can be twice as productive and resourceful.

Keep a Buffer

Do not plan your activities back-to-back because in the real world, some of your activities are bound to take longer than planned. Once that happens it will have a cascading effect on the subsequent activities’ schedule thus derailing the entire schedule of the day. This is just like delayed train. Once a train gets delayed, its scheduled arrival time at every subsequent train station gets delayed further and it eventually ends up choking the whole railway system. So always keep a buffer to cushion the delays and if you don’t require that buffer, it’ll be good for you to grab coffee or catch on with Instagram, lol!!

Keep Spare Time

It will be good to accept and recognize the fact that we are all humans and after a little while we get fatigued and need a break. Do not feel guilty about them and keep some spare time, maybe after every 2 or 3 activities, so that you can take a break, refresh and come back recharged. These breaks can be of 15 minutes duration, say after every two hours. You can use this time to take a stroll, make phone calls or even watch a video. This is a good idea because it will recharge your batteries and keep your productivity high.

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Summary

The above 7 time management techniques that are mentioned above are no rocket science. However, we all, during the daily rigmaroles of our lives tend to forget them and start acting like a slave to the clock. This should change and instead of being a slave to time, you should organize your day well to put your time and energy to productive use.