Everyone knows about the concept of “time management”. Everyone has felt the lack of time, the pressure of deadlines, and experienced the stress of having to rush. Knowing these myths and tips will help you with your schedule and leave time not only for work but also for rest.
The Most Common Myths
No One Can Manage Time
The statement is correct in form but erroneous in content. It’s impossible to manage time. No one can slow it down, speed it up, or stop it, even for a moment.
But a person can control himself, his decisions and actions in time, and determine priorities. This is what time-management practitioners talk about: managing one’s own life.
A sensible and pragmatic approach to one’s actions is time management. You will be surprised at how many minutes and hours are freed up once you begin to act more deliberately and consciously.
Remember that all successful people plan their affairs and act with maximum productivity. They work about the same amount as normal people, but they always manage to get more done. Their secret is that they manage to do more things per unit of time, which ultimately affects their life results.
Time Management Will Make You Work More Intensely
Working too much and getting tired and neglecting rest is a direct path to overwork and burnout. It’s necessary to constantly strive to reduce the amount of work while increasing the results. How to do it? In short, to act according to a plan and to separate the secondary from the primary.
Effective use of time management methods doesn’t mean doing more or increasing productivity at the expense of speed.
It’s about improving personal performance by eliminating unnecessary tasks and eliminating “time eaters.” These include the hundreds of meaningless and small tasks we do throughout the day without even thinking about their appropriateness. Frequent checking emails, chatting and watching news on social media, or meaningless conversations with colleagues.
A person’s commitment to distracted tasks is partly due to procrastination, the desire to put off important and necessary things.
However, if you recognize the importance and significance of current tasks, you will have neither the strength nor the desire to be distracted by extraneous matters.
Time Management Will Turn You Into a Robot
People are afraid of turning into robots, but in fact, they already are, as well as slaves of their own psycho-emotional habits and behavior patterns.
Time management does not limit our freedom, but creates it.
Time management is necessary not only for office workers, executives and managers. Everyone who treats himself responsibly and seriously needs to manage the main resource of life – his own time.
The practical criterion for implementing time management principles in life is the presence of 4 or more tasks for a day. This is necessary for businessmen, freelancers, and housewives.
For example, if you need to finish a project at work, talk to your boss about it, go to the phone repair shop after work, and pick up your baby from kindergarten, time planning is a necessity.
Planning and allocating resources helps you achieve important goals faster and free up time for gambling at a trusted casino website or your favorite Netflix series. Time management allows you to achieve results faster and with less effort.
As for living according to a schedule, reasonable organization of work and rest has never hurt anyone. And there is always a place for spontaneity and creativity in any work.
Top 4 Time Management Tips
Let’s move on to practice and find out how to manage time, where to start controlling and planning your actions, what difficulties arise along the way, and how to overcome them.
Plan Your Actions
Planning for the day ahead is essential in any job. Whether you’re sitting in an office or working as a part-time courier in your spare time, a clear plan of action is always beneficial.
Even if your activities are governed by a job description, you should have a plan in advance. It’ll help you cope with your work more efficiently and promptly.
Remember some of the most important axioms of time management:
- Write down your goals. If your goal is not written down on paper (or in an e-diary), then it doesn’t exist.
- Plan your day. Making a to-do list in advance increases your productivity by 25%.
- Split up large tasks. They should always be divided into several smaller subtasks – don’t tackle a large-scale project without thinking through your actions in advance.
- Planning should become your second nature. Make a plan for tomorrow before going to bed. In the morning, you’ll already know exactly where to start, what to continue, and how to finish.
Remember that the few minutes you take to make a plan will pay off in the future. You will appreciate the results of good planning in the first week.
Formulate the Result Into Specific Goals
Planning is impossible without proper goal-setting. You should be able to clearly formulate the main goal and be able to break it down into individual tasks.
Fix Your Action Plan
There are several tools to make your plans and objectives more visible and specific.
One such method is called the Gantt Chart. Here’s how it works. Let’s say your goal is to build a house. To begin with, you should break the task down into several stages: clear the site, dig and lay the foundation, do the above-ground work, finish the rooms, make the utilities, and do the landscaping.
The Grant chart lists all the tasks of the current large-scale project, along with their timing, duration, and order of completion.
The tasks of the same type can be grouped into a single item, and it is reasonable to divide more extensive tasks into several consecutive tasks.
The visualization allows the other participants to get involved in the work from the right stage.
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