Time management is about the rational allocation of hours in a day to get everything done, get a full 7-8 hours of sleep, be efficient and stay healthy. It’s a skill that’s worth practicing all the time.

Understanding what time management is and what its principles allow you not only to achieve your goals with minimum effort and in the right time frame. But also to keep in balance the different areas of life, without sacrificing either rest, or communication with relatives, or taking care of their own health. That is, time management is also about the same work-life balance.

Realize you have time

Chances are, you’re pretty sure you don’t have a single minute to spare. So making more time, finding time for a hobby, or starting a new business is almost unrealistic. But free essay writer from Wowessays, think that even in the tightest of schedules it is possible to find a free half an hour.

This can be tested. Draw a table with 7 columns and 16-17 rows. The columns are for the days of the week, the rows for the active hours in the day (hopefully 7-8 hours you sleep). Now enter in the table all the activities for the week. Include absolutely everything you spend time on – even showering, eating lunch, going to the shop, traveling to and from work. You’ll be sure to leave some blank cells – this is your free time. Fill them in with a colored marker for clarity and to help you manage them.

Set your priorities

Time management doesn’t teach you how to do absolutely everything. But you don’t need to. The key is to determine which tasks are truly important to you. That’s the first step to effective time management.

And to identify your main tasks, you need to understand your end goal. Franklin pyramid will help.

Fill it out from the bottom up. In this way, you will formulate global goals based on your life values. A master plan based on the global goals, and so on. And so among the daily tasks, it will be easy to identify those that are needed to achieve your goals. These will become the priorities.

You can also analyze your to-do list with the Eisenhower matrix.

Write the tasks for the day into squares: “urgent and important”, “non-urgent and important”, “urgent, unimportant”, “non-urgent, unimportant”. Tasks from square #1 – “Urgent and important” – are your priority, so they should be done first.

Tasks from square two can be stretched over several days. Square #3 is something you need to delegate or automate. And the task in box number 4 is simply to cross off your list.

The ABC method is simpler but no less effective. Divide the task into several levels: A – most important, B – slightly less important, and so on. You can use as many levels as you like, but keep in mind: the more levels, the easier it is to confuse the list.

Give up multitasking

The truth is, our brain does not know how to multitask. When you’re trying to focus on several things at once, it has to switch constantly.

This, firstly, reduces the speed of work. And secondly, it takes more energy. So it’s much more effective to immerse yourself in one task and only start the next one after you’ve completed it.

Make to-do lists

Be sure to fix the tasks and their deadlines. We recommend using several lists for this purpose:

  •     Global – with long term plans and goals;
  •     Monthly – with tasks per month;
  •     Daily – with a clear to-do list for the day.

Make a daily list of tasks for the next day every evening. In front of each one, write the goal according to the lunar global list. For example: “To write an article about new trends in marketing” – “To add to your portfolio” – “To submit it to the same magazine”. Hang the global most list in a prominent place for extra motivation.

Remember, perfect is the enemy of the good

Perfectionism can play a cruel trick on you if you don’t keep it under control. Aiming for the perfect result can lead to procrastination so that you’ll never have enough time to do everything “right. But it’s better to be less than perfect than not at all.