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Time Management: Quick Tips To Be More Effective

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How well do you manage your time? Do you find yourself wishing that:

  • There were more hours in the day/week
  • You could clone yourself to get everything done
  • You would finish everything on your daily to-do list

You are not alone. We have heard about time management; we all know about the “if you touch it – do something with it” rule. But how many can say that they really use their time wisely every day?

Entrepreneur Magazine has written an article with ten great tips for management your time. Here are just a couple for you to consider:

  • Any activity or conversation that’s important to your success should have a time assigned to it. To-do lists get longer and longer to the point where they’re unworkable. Appointment books work. Schedule appointments with yourself and create time blocks for high-priority thoughts, conversations, and actions. Schedule when they will begin and end. Have the discipline to keep these appointments.
  • Plan to spend at least 50 percent of your time engaged in the thoughts, activities, and conversations that produce most of your results.
  • Schedule time for interruptions. Plan time to be pulled away from what you’re doing. Take, for instance, the concept of having “office hours.” Isn’t “office hours” another way of saying “planned interruptions?”

Life Hack offers 20 more time management tips – here are just a few that are worth the consideration:

  • Prioritize. Since you can’t do everything, learn to prioritize the important and let go of the rest. Apply the 80/20 principle which is a key principle in prioritization. Read more about 80/20 in #6 of 13 Strategies To Jumpstart Your Productivity.
  • Delegate. If there are things that can be better done by others or things that are not so important, consider delegating. This takes a load off and you can focus on the important tasks.
  • Batch similar tasks together. For related work, batch them together. For example, my work can be categorized into these core groups: (1) writing (articles, my upcoming book) (2) coaching (3) workshop development (4) business development (5) administrative. I batch all the related tasks together so there’s synergy. If I need to make calls, I allocate a time slot to make all my calls. It really streamlines the process.
  • Eliminate your time wasters. What takes your time away from your work? Facebook? Twitter? Email checking? Stop checking them so often. One thing you can do is make it hard to check them – remove them from your browser quick links/bookmarks and stuff them in a hard to access bookmarks folder. Replace your browser bookmarks with important work-related sites. While you’ll still check FB/Twitter no doubt, you’ll find it’s a lower frequency than before.

If you have been following me, you know that I feel strongly about delegation. I wrote an article entitled Delegation – 9 Steps to Delegate Your Way to Succes.

However, even before you can delegate you to have to first come up with a plan – a plan for your overall journey as well as for the days and weeks ahead.

When you look at the time you spend each day; where are the bottle-neck times/tasks? Why are these tasks holding you up? Is it because you don’t enjoy them, don’t know how to do them, don’t see the value? Spend a little time assessing these tasks and determine if there is another way or another person who might be better suited to completing these tasks.

Each day we have only a finite number of minutes. How will you make that time count?

 

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JJ DiGeronimo

JJ DiGeronimo

Speaker, Author & Thought Leader for Women in Tech & Girls in STEM.

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