The process of planning, organizing, and delegating your time between your tasks in a rightful way is called time management. People say, “Time is money, “ so time needs to be managed intelligently. Time management is important to make our work and life simplified. The methods for time management will make you smarter instead of working harder.
8 Effective Techniques For Time Management
Whether you are a student, professional, housewife, business person, or someone else, you need to apply a time management strategy to prioritize your tasks and achieve the end result. Below are some practical and effective methods for time management that will help you be the master of utilizing precious time with small practices.
1. Plan Your Day
You must plan your to do beforehand, either a day before or at the start of the day. Prepare a to-do-lists and prioritize your tasks according to their importance. Jot it down on paper, in a notepad, or use note sticker and adhere it to your console. This is crucial step in the methods for time management .
2. Sort Your Task
Sort your day activities or tasks as most important, medium important, and least important. Then, rank the activities on a scale of 1 to 10 and write the small details on how the task is to be accomplished. This is a key area in the methods for time management. Without this, the tasks will go haywire.
3. Delegate The Work
Divide the work among people with you to reduce your burden and thus increase the probability of successful accomplishment of the tasks. For example, if you plan to go for a picnic, delegate tasks among the family members, such as who will look after purchases, cooling, transport, event organizing, etc. Delegation can be done vertically or horizontally based on the expertise of the person in charge of the respective tasks.
4. Limit Your Distraction
It is common to get distracted, which leads to delays in work, so it is important to limit our own and our team’s distraction from the work to attain the desired output. For example, limiting socializing, talking or gossiping, use of mobile phones, checking Emails frequently, etc. will limit our distraction.
5. Batch Your Work
Specifying the time duration for each task and breaking the bigger tasks into smaller ones will help us to manage time effectively. This is how we can split the work to be done in a given stipulated time and increase our efficiency in completing the same before or on time.
6. Organize The Work Sequence
Organize the sequence of your tasks based on a given stipulated time. Proper sequencing is the most vital method for time management. For example, in the same example of going for a picnic, the first task is to arrange for transport, purchase eatables, then arrange things to carry, list and place safety tools, etc, which are the proper organization or sequence of tasks.
7. Monitor your or your team’s performance
Constant monitoring of the performance is needed to check oneself from deviation and increase efficiency. In the case of teamwork, after dividing the work, the performance of each member or department needs to be monitored so that there is no deviation from the plan. The desired output should be matched timely with the actual output, and the gap, if any, should be adjusted.
8. Know To Say No In The Meeting
Time management is good when you stick to your plan. But sometimes, more tasks are assigned, which may exceed your stipulated time of completion. So to avoid delay, learn to say when to say No.
Summarise And Review Your Day
This is the last step in the methods for time management . Here you can honestly review your tasks and teammate tasks and analyze whether you were able to achieve the desired output or not. Then analyse the gaps and steps to overcome them and make your next plan accordingly.
