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Time management is not just the scheduling or planning of your day, without knowing what time management really involves, you will end up struggling to stay focus or achieve anything substantial every day.
How to Improve and Enhance on Your Time Management
The mistake most people do when they want to improve their time management skill is that they get enrolled for a 1 day course of lesson and get psyched up about time management, they get to work the next day ready and happy to practise what they were taught only to realise at the end of the day that they have achieved nothing as usual. The reason why that method won’t work is that time management classes are focusing on the wrong things, the major things you need to focus on when you want to have more effective time management skills are your habits and patterns of behavior. Changing your habits and patterns of behavior requires dedication, patience, and hard work, these are not things that can be learned in one day of time management class. and these are the traits you need to inculcate.(Read about why you can’t sleep well at night and how to solve it here)
Effective Strategies, Methods, and Tips That Makes You Manage Your Time Better and Wisely
if you really want to manage your time and get things done these are the top and most popular time management techniques
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Create a Daily To-do List
Creating a daily to-do list ensures that important jobs or chores that need to get done are done, creating a to-do list is very important because it outlines what you have to do for the day, a to-do list also helps in managing the activities of the day. Keeping a to-do list close to you ensures that you update it instantly when a must do job pops up, a handy to-do list also means you can strike off the activities you have done and see your daily progress, this has an overall effect of encouraging you to make use of the to-do list. Seeing a daily to-do with all the jobs on the list marked as done at the end of the day gives you a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.(read on reasons why you should get your eyes checked here)
2. Make Sure You Write Down Your Appointments
Writing down and documenting your appointments are very important, this is what will remind you to include your appointments on the daily to-do list to avoid being surprised with an appointment or meeting you have forgotten, you might have gotten scheduled for an appointment days or even months before then, an appointment calendar reminds you of the appointment, this enables you to reduce some chores on your to-do list to accommodate the appointment. Reviewing your appointment Calender while writing the To Do list every morning is the best practice, so as to include your daily appointments in the to-do list and also to avoid overbooking or under booking activities for yourself that day. Having appointment calendar helps you to know which appointment you will likely not be able to meet so that you can reschedule them or send in a substitute to replace you.( read on why people commit suicide here)
3. Determine Your Activities Priority
Setting priority to your daily to-do list is one of the most important aspects of time management because it helps you to determine which activities that have to be done today and the ones that can wait for tomorrow. Setting your activities priority ensures that you do the jobs that have a close time constraint or deadline before the activities that have no close deadline. Setting priorities also enhances how organised your monthly time management is because it also helps you to give high priority to chores or jobs that are prerequisite to other activities, for example, if it is very important that you go to the gym tomorrow morning, then the activity “Buy a gym outfit” will be set as a priority for today and under no circumstance will it not be achieved today.(read on the effect of parenting style on a child’s academic performance here)
4. Setting and Making Use of Alarm
Using an alarm is important because it reminds you when it is time for the next activity. Sometimes you get engrossed on a task and you don’t realize that the time allocated for that activity has been far spent, setting an alarm to notify you some minutes before the new job will remind you of the activity and also provide you ample time to round off your present task. in situations when your next task is some distance from your present location, make sure the time you set your alarm to also include the time it will take you to get there.(read an interesting write-up on mental stress versus physical stress here)
5. Break-up Large or Big Tasks into Smaller Activities
Many have realized the fact that when dealing with big and large tasks, they achieve less, this is because it is the joy of completing tasks that keep them going, so when the task is so big that completion date is not closeby, they get bored. The solution is simple, break down big tasks into smaller ones you can accomplish easily, with time you won’t even know when you accomplish the main task itself.
6. Do the Hard task Early in the Day
It is important that after setting your priority for the day, you do the hard task first, this is because early in the day you still have so much energy to tackle hard things, if you do the easy jobs first and you become exhausted from doing them, you will not be able to tackle the hard job again. so it is important that you do the hard task first.
7. Do Not Procrastinate
Procrastination is the number one time management disruptor, once you procrastinate a particular task, it becomes easy for you not to do the other jobs on your list and the series continues, so whatever you do, Do NOT PROCRASTINATE.( read on things to do to attain academic excellence here)
8. Set Time Limits for Your Hobbies
you need to set time limits for your hobby every day, so as to have enough time to do the activities or your daily todo list, if you don’t set time limits for your hobbies, you could become engrossed in them to the point that you forget other activities, hobbies to set time limit to may include; surfing the net, gaming, watching tv, social media e.t.c( read an interesting article on how to be free from depression here)
Summary of Effective Time Management Techniques/ Strategies
Either you are a student or a professional, make sure you create routines and make sure you abide by it. In time management, it is important that all the routines listed above followed daily, it will not be beneficial to your programme if you do this thing the first day and you skip them the next day, you have to continue to do them on till they become part of you, Scientifically it was agreed that it takes at least 21 days of you doing the same thing daily before your body gets used to it as a habit.
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