Why is it that plans are always frustrated by distractions? Why is it that someone can be more productive than others with the same environment? People are busy living life every day, but at night they find that they don’t seem to be doing much. Actually, it’s not about how much time you have, what matters is how you spend your time, and the key lies in time management skills.
Time management is the ability to plan and control how you spend the hours in a day to accomplish your goals effectively, which involves juggling time between the domains of life -work, home, social life and hobbies. It is important to establish clear goals and priorities in order to set aside non-essential tasks which can be a waste of time, and to monitor where the time actually goes.
Here we’ll show you 6 practical tips, just read this guide and find all the answers you seek:
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Record Time
Only by being highly sensitive to the passage of time, can you become an effective time manager, and most people simply can’t remember how much they spend each day getting things done. So over the next week, you can keep track of how much time each little thing occupies, such as playing games, watching videos, or browsing social media, etc.
Recording lets you know where the time is going, and it is also a wake-up call. When you realize you’re wasting a lot of time on meaningless things, you’ll take immediate action. And this kind of record is the reference data that studies how to use time efficiently, you can make reasonable adjustment gradually according to the actual situation.
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Four Quadrants
In the face of complicated affairs, we can use ” The Four Quadrants of Time Management ” to allocate energy wisely – according to the two different dimensions of importance and emergency, basically everything can be classified as: important and urgent, important but not urgent, not important but urgent, not important and not urgent, and it is recommended to spend more time on those non-urgent but important things.
When evaluating a task, the importance is judged according to professional values, and the urgency is determined on the basis of time limit. So just put all items on your to-do list into the four-quadrants, and then adopt different handling principles and methods for matters in different quadrants. Only by establishing priorities, can the limited time bring out maximum value. Learn how to appreciate your time, and it might surprise you in the near future.
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Setup Memo
No matter how perfect your schedule is, it does not help if the tasks are not completed on time. Our energy is limited after all, in the case of constant external interference, we need the help of tools to remember all the things, and memo is certainly the most useful one. You can mark the calendar as a memo, or select a functional notebook to record each of your important tasks.
But for office workers who face computers all day, a detailed work schedule in Excel can be more practical since you can re-edit it anytime and intelligentize it with some tips and tricks for Microsoft app, such as adding auto reminders on due date in Excel. You can check detailed steps and more related tutorials on MyOfficeTricks. And to better remind yourself, you can also print the worksheet out and place it prominently on your desk or on the wall.
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Stay Focused
How often do you check your phone for notifications while writing an email or making a PPT presentation? Certainly, multitasking is an extraordinary skill, but it will make you unconsciously waste a lot of time on trivial things. So be as focused as you can on a task, and always keeping your direction and goals in mind.
In addition, don’t pursue the seeming high efficiency, thus continually accelerating blindly, but forget the focus of your life. If you learned how to focus on what’s important, you can have the initiative in hands. By constantly improving your own creativity, you will eventually gain yourself more time and also find the balance between work and personal life.
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Accept Laziness
There is a big misconception about success: some people believe that the first step to success is to make the most of your time, and the way to increase efficiency is to schedule every moment of your life meaningfully, which means, always being proactive even on weekends or holidays.
Don’t be misled by this idea, you should know that relax and enjoy life is also a source of creativity and inspiration. High productivity gives you more disposable time, while the slow pace of life can adjust the mentality under the pressure. You can check the list of the best productivity apps provided by Pixpa that make our lives better, faster, and more comfortable. We should switch between fast and slow, and forget about work during breaks.
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Perseverance
Science technique in the world change with each passing day nowadays and the renewal of knowledge increase in a geometric progression. Naturally, we also need to keep up with this flow of the times: in order not to be eliminated by the society, we cannot but lifelong learning and continuously improve our competitiveness in the global marketplace.
Due to this increasing pressure, the road ahead is becoming more and more tortuous. In many cases, it’s easy for us to get lost in the fast-moving society because of hustle and bustle, but only through perseverance, can we break through the existing constraints and obstacles. Perseverance boils down to self-discipline, without which no trouble or difficulty can be solved.
Effective management gives you back control of your day. It’s the cornerstone skill that will help you with everything from increasing productivity to building good habits, setting proper goals, avoiding burnout, and finding work-life balance.
In the rapidly developing society, time management ability is a basic requirement for office workers. And meanwhile, it can also have a positive impact on everyone who wants to live a productive life by reminding and guiding our behavior through prior planning.
