How to effectively manage your time to be more productive

Managing time is crucial and challenging in a dynamic business environment. This pandemic has relocated employees and forced them to work and coordinate from their homes. Work from office and home are two different worlds where each one of us connects virtually.

We all have 24 hours in a day. How we manage that time is entirely on us. Time management skill is essential to achieve success in personal goals as well as professional goals.

5 Ways to Manage Your Time Effectively

Prioritize your tasks

Create a to-do-list and pen down all the tasks for the day, even before starting your day. It is a powerful way to keep you engaged in the work, thus helping you complete tasks and become more productive. A To do list acts as a reminder to improve visibility of different work activities. Prioritizing tasks keeps you focused throughout the day’s activities and get high impact work done. You can set up a reminder for your to-do-list on your smartphone and also on your workstation.

Scheduling Time

When was the last time you scheduled your day either for work or a hangout plan with your group? We all do this inadvertently every day, but we don’t realize it. Only when we begin to think about it or in retrospect, we can find that we are more efficient in completing and meeting our deadlines this way. For example, we can divide our whole day into two halves, morning and evening; and then further re-divide it into smaller chunks of 30 mins or an hour. Another way we can leverage scheduling is through a google meetings calendar and calendar on our laptops.

Be Focused at work- Avoid Distractions.

Distractions have been one of the main reasons affecting productivity levels. Constant notifications from apps like Whatsapp, Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram deviate our mind and steal away precious time. Suppose we don’t limit ourselves from using our phone at work. In that case, it will inadvertently limit ourselves from finishing that important work our client is hoping us to finish and deliver soon. You can consider the idea of a clean desk policy-wherein you keep things that are needed to complete the work like your laptop, mouse, notebook, and bottle of water. The idea is to keep as many items that are required to do our work and not items that will distract us.

Be Organized

Organizational skill is very appreciable to have. Without it, a lot of things can go wrong or worse; you can become a hindrance to somebody else’s progress. Let me elaborate on this. If you have a closet where you keep all your digital gears like phones, USB cables, disk drives, smartwatches and a whole other bunch, then I am pretty sure it will take you some time to find the item from these many selections. Wouldn’t you? But if you have a desk or table organizer with dedicated slots, label and keep items in its designated place, you will not have a problem finding what you want. A library is a good example that aptly sums up what it means to be organized.

Avoid multitasking

Although one can argue for multitasking, and there is nothing implicitly detrimental about it, it can lead to distraction mainly to those people who are not so well at managing multiple tasks simultaneously. The right way to be efficient in managing time would be to first list down the tasks in numerical order and then focus on each task one after the other. Thus, by ticking off each item from the list/order, you can also feel a sense of accomplishment and allow yourself to drive more fervently to complete the remaining task. It is not only rewarding and satisfying but also helps you to save time.