12 Time Management Techniques To Mix & Match

Time management is about planning and organizing the time you will spend on specific activities. The main purpose is to increase efficiency and productivity and finding ways to manage your time is vital to living a balanced life

There are more than 50 time management techniques out there, for all the different personality characters, productivity issues and business needs.

Exactly which strategies will work best for you will vary person-by-person and situation-by-situation.?

The main idea behind every time management technique is described by the tips in the following picture. Based on those tips, the time management techniques described in this article, where chosen.

Time Management Techcniques

SMART Goals

The S.M.A.R.T. acronym outlines a strategy for reaching any objective in life. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and anchored within a Time Frame.

·???????Specific – clearly defined desired outcome, what you want to achieve. Use precise words and target a specific area for improvement.

Try to answer the five "W" questions":

What do I want to accomplish?

Why is this goal important?

Who is involved?

Where is it located?

Which resources or limits are involved?

What restrictions might I encounter?

·???????Measurable – there must be a way to measure progress. Quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress, and in this way, you can track your progress and stay motivated.

·???????Achievable – the goal can be met with available resources. Goals should be realistic, achievable, and big enough to push you forward.

·???????Relevant – it must fit a bigger picture and you must know why you want to achieve something. How does the goal align with broader goals? Why is the result important?

·???????Time-bound – a clear and realistic deadline for when the goal will be achieved. When you have a deadline in place, it will be easier to focus on achieving your goal and keep other, less important tasks off your mind.

SMART goals allow you to lay a solid and clear foundation setting you up on a path to success.The main idea behind this tool is to inject clarity, focus and motivation into our goal-achieving process.

Eat the frog

This technique is named after a Mark Twain quote: “Eat a live frog the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” According to productivity consultant Brian Tracy your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.

How it works:

·???????Identify the frog : Your frog should take half a day’s work, tops. A clearly defined, realistic task will make it easier to get started and not procrastinate on

·???????Eat it : Do it first thing when you sit down to work. Focus all of your mental energy on your frog and only your frog

·???????Repeat every day : Practice is the key to mastering any skill. With practice, you can learn any behavior or develop any habit that you consider either desirable or necessary.

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro (Tomato) Technique invented by the software developer and author?Francesco Cirillo?in the late 1980's. Today, Pomodoro is one of the most popular time management techniques out there.

The idea of Pomodoro is thay you should break down your daily work and complete it in intervals separated by short breaks. You should use a simple timer to follow the Pomodoro Technique. It gives you a sense of urgency and enough focus and recovery time to maximize your productivity.

The five Pomodoro steps:

1.????Decide on a task to be done

2.????Set the pomodoro timer

3.????Work on the task. End work when the timer rings after 25 minutes (one Pomodoro)

4.????If you have fewer than four Pomodori, take a short break (3–5 minutes)

5. After 4 Pomodori, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), then go back to step 1

Eisenhower matrix, or the urgent-important matrix.

The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the most popular frameworks for prioritizing tasks. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, serving between the years 1953 and 1961.

His matrix recommends arranging tasks in one of the four quadrants:

1.????Urgent + Important (Do first)

2.????Not Urgent + Important (Schedule)

3.????Urgent + Not Important(Delegate)

4.????Not Important + Not Urgent (Eliminate)

Urgent tasks?are those that you feel you must react to (like emails, phone calls, meetings etc.) and tasks that are time?sensitive to finish, meaning you have strict deadlines and need to get done immediately.?

Important tasks, on the other hand, are the ones that contribute to your long-term goals and things you really want to do in life. Important tasks are the ones that are part of your business or life vision and mission.

The important but not urgent tasks, like sports, learning, creating, bonding with people, you should reguraly schedule in your calendar. All other tasks you should delegate or simply delete.?

Pareto Analysis or the 80/20 rule

The 80/20 rule is a technique created by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. It’s the idea that 20% of actions are responsible for 80% of outcomes.

The goal of Pareto analysis is to help you prioritize tasks that are most effective at solving problems. It’s a way to view your time usage, prioritize your chosen tasks against your most important goals.

This principle is a useful tool to analyse where your time is currently spent, and subsequently determine where it could better be directed to ensure time is spent wisely. The analysis also encourages users to search for simpler and easier methods that are less time consuming to complete each task.

?How it works:

1.????List some of the problems you are facing.?For example, maybe your grades are slipping.

2.????Identify the root cause?of each problem.?Maybe your grades are slipping because you spend too much time on social media.?

3.????Assign a score to each problem: Assign higher numbers to more important problems?

4.????Group problems together by cause: Group together all the problems caused by spending too much time on social media.?

5.????Add up the score of each group: The group with the highest score is the issue you should work on first.?

6.????Take action.

Time Blocking

James Martin was the first to explain the technique in more detail, in one of the chapters of his book?Rapid Application Development. If you know how much of your time you allocate to tasks, projects, and different activities, you will be able to better organize your workday and workflow.

A structured schedule is crucial for actually delivering what you set yourself. It helps you protect space for your work and sets a healthy pressure to actually complete it.?Time blocking?is one of the most productive ways of doing this, as it prevents one task from overtaking your entire day and stops you from multi-tasking

How it works:

1.????Lay out all your activities and tasks on a list

2.????Decide in advance what you want to accomplish with these tasks - define your goals

3.????If a task is important and requires great focus, allocate a longer time period to it (for example, 1 or 2 hours)

4.????If it's a difficult task, parse it, and allocate shorter time periods (for example, 20-30 minutes) to parts of it, to make the task easier to manage

5.????Start from your first task, and work your way down

6.????When the allocated time for a task is up, stop working in it

7.????Take a break

8.????Review what you've managed to accomplish

9.????Turn your attention to other time boxes in your schedule

The benefits of calendarized timeboxing are many, varied, and highly impactful. The practice improves how we feel (control), how much we achieve as individuals (personal productivity), and how much we achieve in the teams we work in (enhanced collaboration).

The 4 Ds

Everybody has their limits. We simply cannot do everything people want us to. It will lead to burnout and work anxiety. The 4Ds encourages you to spend more time on the things that really matter when you have to decide on the spot.

• Delete it:?all of those personal and professional commitments that aren’t important or necessary. As Steve Jobs once said, “deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” Take the time to evaluate what’s wasting your time and remove the time-wasters from your schedule.
• ?Delegate it:?If the task is important, ask yourself if it’s really something that you are responsible for doing in the first place. Can the task be given to someone else? Perhaps is better to outsource administrative work, as well as specialized services (like marketing, web development, or accounting). If you’re an employee, you might not be able to delegate your work in this way. However, you can ask your manager or colleagues for support on challenging projects that would take longer to do on your own.
• ?Do:?Simply put, act! Postponing an important task that needs to be done only creates feelings of anxiety and stress. Do it as early in the day as you can. If your task takes longer than 120 seconds and you still need to do it, work on this task alone for 30 minutes or until you complete it.
• ?Defer:?If the task is one that can’t be completed quickly and is not a high priority item, simply defer it. For tasks that can’t be deleted because they’re essential, you can defer them to another date or time.

If you follow this approach, remember to review your list of deferred tasks at the end of the day or week.

GTD

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a personal productivity system developed by David Allen in 2001.It encourages you to store all of your work information in an external, organized source. It’s a five-step method that helps you to break bigger tasks into smaller manageable steps and then to finish do those small steps immediately.

The five steps the method is based on:

·???????Capture - gather every task that springs to mind into a collection tool.

·???????Clarify - determine whether the task is actionable and whether it has concrete steps you can lay out and follow

·???????Organize - file tasks under different labels, and provide them with context

·???????Reflect - from time to time, review your tasks: What is the next step for the task? Do you really need to finish it this week?

·???????Engage - simply start working on your tasks with confidence and clarity

?The GTD system is easy to set up and flexible to use it:

·???????Reduces the cognitive load and mental strain that comes from trying to remember everything that’s on your plate.

·???????Eliminates multitasking so you have more time to?be in the flow.?

·???????Builds a central source for all information—even non-actionable information.?

·???????Provides a clear sense of the work on your plate so it’s easy to reprioritize or reschedule if necessary.

Kanban

The Japanese word “kanban”, meaning “visual board” or a “sign”, has been used in the sense of a process definition since the 1950s. It was first developed and applied by Toyota as a scheduling system for just-in-time manufacturing.?

The main idea of the Kanban board is to have a visual board that helps you to track progress on your goals. Kanban is a workflow management method for defining, managing and improving services that deliver knowledge work. It aims to help you visualize your work, maximize efficiency, and improve continuously.

Five steps to create a Kanban Board:

1. Visualize your workflow. To create a Kanban Board, get a whiteboard, then break down the flow of work from the moment you start it to when it's finished into distinctive steps and draw a column for each

2. Identify the types of work you do. Decide what kinds of work items you are usually working on. These may be, for example, customer orders, support requests, or maintenance tasks. Assign a distinctive color to each of them, and get a bunch of sticky notes in these colors.

3. Write down tasks on cards and place them on the board. Write down each thing you are working on on a separate color-coded sticky note, and put it onto the board into the respective column. The order of cards in each column should represent their relative priority, with the most urgent ones at the top.

4. Start working with your Kanban board. Work on tasks starting with the ones at the top. When a task is ready to be moved to the next column, place it at its bottom. Such a method of working will help to maintain a high flow of work on your board.

5. Improve the flow of work. Kanban is all about maintaining a high and consistent flow of work. With your board, you should be able to see the overview of work status and instantly identify any problems or bottlenecks. No work item should lag behind, and columns should not be overloaded with tasks. The most straightforward technique to ensure consistent flow is limiting work in progress.

The Glass Jar: Rocks, Pebbles, Sand

This theory helps you figure out what is useful and what is not useful in your daily life. It allows you to plan tasks with time to spare and set priorities for your day.

Categorize your work in this way:

• Rocks:?Your most important strategic projects that need to get done today
• Pebbles:?Projects and tasks that are important but not the most critical. The tasks that need to be completed, but can be done on another day or by someone else.
• Sand:?Smaller, more insignificant tasks The disrupting elements of your day, such as phone calls, text messages, emails, social media, etc.

This is a method that says you need to focus on your largest tasks first (rocks), then your midsize tasks (pebbles), and anything extra you get done during that day is just the icing on the cake (sand).

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law is the idea that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. This may mean you take longer than necessary to complete a task or you procrastinate and complete the task right before the due date.

When given a task, we think of how much time is available to complete the task instead of how much time we actually need. This mindset results in wasted time and inefficient workflows. As Abraham Lincoln said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

This is not a time management technique per se. It’s a law that,when you understand it and put it into the work, you will work more efficiently in shorter bursts of time.

For example:

·???????Try working without a computer charger. This will force you to finish a project before your computer dies.

·???????Get it done early. Instead of finishing an essay by midnight, try to get it done by noon.

·???????Set a deadline. Give yourself a set time to do something—and then cut it in half.

·???????Limit time for tasks. Give yourself only 20 minutes in the morning to answer emails.

Rapid Planning Method (RPM)

RPM was created by Anthony Robbins aims to transform your thinking by causing you to focus on what is truly important, that is, the results that you want. It also focuses on the reasons why you want it. Constructing a flexible plan to achieve it is the next step. Robbins makes a distinction between real progress and merely checking things off your to-do list.

RPM causes you to focus first on what it is you want – the results that you are committed to achieving in your life – before you figure out what it is you need to do.

How it works:

·???????Capturing: Write down all the tasks you need to accomplish this day or this week.

·???????Chunking: Then look for commonalities among them. “Chunk” those individual tasks together into groups. Dedicate a period of time to accomplishing those.

·???????Create your own RPM blocks: On the top of a new sheet of paper, make three columns: the task, the result you want from completing that task, and your purpose for completing it. Next, list the actions you can take to get there.

·???????Create an empowering role for yourself: Anything that will get you jazzed about completing your goal.

There is more than one way to manage your time more effectively and there are various elements to consider. With the right strategies in place like proactive scheduling, personal deadlines, and task prioritization, you can accomplish more work in less time and achieve better work-life balance.

So, Which Time Management process works for you?