Time management is an essential tool in our recent busy life. Sometimes we feel stress, tense and anxious for work overload. You can learn how to skyrocket your productivity levels by applying the 4 time management techniques shown below.
Are you not as productive as you wish to be? Do you want to start taking control of your life and eliminate time-wasting activities in your day?
Four Important Time Management Techniques
These 4 techniques will help you to find out the main effective way to reduce procrastination. Just follow and see the magic.
1. Identify Unproductive Tasks to Start Increasing Your Personal Productivity Levels
First, take a few seconds to think where your time goes every day.
List down your daily activities, you will eventually find out how many unimportant things you could have avoided.
Start now, take out a sheet of paper, and list down:
• Tasks that do not contribute to your personal productivity
• Distractions that COULD have been avoided
The reason for creating this list is to learn how to reduce your time-wasting habits and replace them with more productive tasks.
Just list it down on 1 sheet of paper. Did your activities involve reading all those junk mail, chatting with friends/colleagues when you had to work, or answering those unimportant phone calls? Don’t let these things distract you from finishing what you were supposed to do.
Keep this list for 30 days and try to avoid doing everything you wrote on it.
• Tasks which did not contribute to your personal productivity (Reading junk mail, unnecessary chat with friends during work hours etc…)
• Distractions that COULD have been avoided (watching TV before completing your work)
Make this a 30-day challenge to reduce time-wasting activities.
2. Time Management Matrix
Time Management Matrix is an important task given by Stephen Covey. This time Management Matrix helps to identify prioritizing activities.
The table below is from his book First Things First.
| Urgent | Not urgent | |
| Important | Quadrant 1
| Quadrant 2
|
| Not Important | Quadrant 3
| Quadrant 4
|
To achieve maximum results from what you do, you must complete the task in quadrant 1 FIRST, then quadrant 2 followed by quadrant 3 and last quadrant 4.
3. Next Technique for Time Management… Know Where Your Time Goes
Use a diary or time log, start recording your daily activities from today onward. Just write down your activities in your time log.
You MUST know where your time goes before you can start managing your time well. This is the first simple step you must take to take control of your time!
Review your time log weekly. After a week, review and analyze your time log. Ask yourself when were the times you felt you had the most energy or when you were wasting your time.
4. Create a New Time Management Habit in 30 Days!
The time management techniques above help you eliminate time-wasting activities, but you will also need to condition new habits for success.
Habits take around 28-30 days to form, so repeat any tasks for 28 days until you condition a new habit. For instance, the new habit you want to form is to exercising daily.
Right now, take your time to choose only 1 activity which you want to make habit within the next 28 days, and repeat it for 28 days.
Then for the next 28 days start carrying out that task daily without any excuses.
Jerry Seinfeld used an interesting technique for creating a chain.
For each day that you succeed at completing a productive task, mark an X on your calendar. After completing the task for the following day, mark another X on the calendar. As you continue you will create a chain of X’s on your calendar, the key is to not break that chain!
It will take some effort, but it will be worth your time and effort to achieving your life goals.
But when you manage to form a new habit, you will no longer find yourself dreading to complete a task, you’ll simply do it because it’s a habit.
I can also share an effective book for time management “Project Management Tools and Techniques: A Practical Guide, Second Edition” This book is written by
Take action immediately, apply these 3 time management techniques and you WILL see yourself managing your time more effectively. Just follow the above tricks and get success more and more.