There are plenty of excellent time management tools available free to suit every need. These are unlikely to work unless the skills of time management should be well understood before applying the tools. using a time management program/ app without the required time management skills will not produce the desired results and would be a waste of effort and time.
Time management is a decision-making process that organises, protects and adjusts your time to changing environmental conditions.
There are three perquisites
Awareness Understanding that time is a limited resource and plan realistically
Arrangement Design, organise goals, plans, schedules, tasks to effectively use time
Adaptation Monitoring the use of time and adjusting to interruptions and changing priorities.
We are aware of planning our goals, schedules and tasks. Most of the programs/ apps are very good at scheduling and planning. But the other two aspects need more understanding and adaptation.
All three aspects are equally important to overall time management performance. People struggled with awareness and adaptation skills. These two skills are difficult to develop naturally without direct interventions.
Awareness skills are important to avoid procrastination and adaption skill is critical for prioritising the activities.
How to improve time management skills?
Figuring out where you need to focus. Doing a deep dive into your current skill level is the only way to assess this. Three steps you can take to improve your skill.
Build self-awareness of your time management skill: Seek feedback from colleagues, managers establish a baseline of behaviours against which to evaluate improvements.
Preferences are important, but not very much: Understand your preferences and personality related to time management and understand where you might struggle as this goes against your existing habits. Skills can be developed and give you the most benefits in developing time management skill.
Identify and prioritise the skill you need to improve: Prioritise your skill development focusing on the most important first and then going to the next. Do not spread your efforts too thin and across too many needs.
There are quite a few tactics to improve your skills. Tactics are for improving our skills and not the end goal. This will ultimately improve your time management.
Developing awareness skills: Effectiveness is about doing things well and efficiency is about doing things quickly. Both are crucial.
Find your peak performance time: Break the typical day into 4 or 5 slots and keep track for a week and rank them from your most productive to the least productive.
Treat your time like money: Create a time budget as to how you spend your hours. categorise them into "must do's " and "want to dos'"
Time your task: record how long you have spent on tasks with clear deadlines.
Evaluate how realistically you assess your time: Evaluate how long you thought it would take and how much time it actually took.
Take a futuristic perspective: Think about how tasks that you are doing right today will help or hurt you in future.
Avoid sunk cost fallacy: When you realise that you are spending too much time on a particular task, evaluate its importance.
Developing awareness skills: Unfamiliar but important tasks take more time and are often unpredictable. Developing awareness skills is about taking control of your work and then restructuring your tasks around it.
Prioritise your tasks, activities
Avoid urgency effect: Urgent requires immediate action and important requires more time.
Use a calendar app: Record due dates or tasks and appointments
Schedule protected time: mark an appointment with yourself to ensure uninterrupted time to devote to your important tasks.
Reduce underestimation: When making plans ask a third party to estimate the time required.
Break up large projects: If tasks or projects are too big (time-consuming) break it up into manageable chunks so that it can be completed as well as do not seem so large.
Developing adaptation skills
High pressure/ crisis situations should be handled without getting upset, anxious or distracted.
Habit stacking Stack similar tasks/ work
Use short bursts of work: When a task requires concentration or seem too big, put in maximum effort for 20-30 minutes and then take a break so that you make progress and the task does not seem so big.
Set up detailed reminders: When you set up reminders in your calendar, give detailed descriptions so that you can grasp its importance rather than trying to recall its importance.
Create contingency plans: Plan for crisis and allocate time for it
Reduce time-wasters: Create do not disturb time slots every day to complete your planned work.
Do not jump at quick fixes and instead invest in assessing and underlying time management skills to improve and prioritise our work.
Time Management Is About More Than Life Hacks by Erich C. Dierdorff
HBR January 29, 2020
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