As we all know, time is a precious commodity – it is one of the few resources we have that we simply cannot get back. If you waste an hour procrastinating, you cannot earn that hour back. It is gone; that is now time you have wasted. For many of us, dealing with time management is a massive undertaking. Being able to complete tasks in a quicker fashion without impacting on the end result and overall quality is very important.
The quicker you can finish things without lessening quality, the more free time you have to yourself. This gives you more time to enjoy life, to spend time with others, and to relieve yourself of stress. It also gives you valuable time to self-develop, improving the professional and personal skills you need to enjoy your best life. How, though, can you work towards having more time? How can you make every moment count?
There are numerous resources that you can use to improve your time management. A great place to start, though, is with the Inside Out Skills Podcast. In the episode related to managing time, Shawn shares tips on better time management to help you build the life you deserve from the inside out. He explains signs of poor time management and a few areas you can focus on to improve your time management.
Planning and knowing your limits are key to time management
So, the first thing to focus on when it comes to active time management if how well you organize tasks. Many of us try to do everything – the planning, and the actual action – all at once. Instead, it is always better to pre-plan. For example, do you work from home? Then you could spend your last hour before going to bed setting up all of the resources you need for the next day.
This allows you to spend less time in the morning trying to find the solutions; now, if any problems pop up, you are prepared to deal with them. When you try to organize everything at the same time as actually taking on the task, you leave yourself precious little wiggle room for errors, problems, and mishaps.
Another key aspect of time management is knowing what you can and cannot take on. Many of us choose to take on more tasks than we can handle, leading to late deliveries and general headaches that cause blocks to your productivity. This inevitably leads to us rushing to try and finish tasks off, causing us to harm our performance.
For that reason, it is absolutely essential that you understand the importance of time management. The more time you spend planning, the easier it is to enact your tasks with good grace and the right amount of time to complete the good to a high standard.
Time management all stems from two key changes: planning for the day ahead and knowing how much you can fit into one day. You might believe you can take on your maximum amount of work per day on a regular basis; before long, though, you will suffer from burnout and thus your performance will dip.
To take better control of your time, you need to be able to closely focus on what you can fit into a day without compromising quality. You might have to start providing longer deadlines to clients, instead of trying to fit everyone in across a timeframe that you cannot meet.
This leaves precious time for planning, which further hampers quality. The main way to get full control of your use of time, then, is to start focusing on pre-planning and ensuring you can handle the agreed workload. The more often you do this, the more likely it is that you can retain a consistent, high standard of efficiency.
Planning helps us to complete the job, while it also helps us to avoid taking on too much at once. This means you can properly space out your deadlines, commit to doing the best job you can, and reduce the day-to-day stress that you are feeling.
We also invite you again to listen to the Insite Out Skills podcast and, along with the above skills, you should find it much easier to start making meaning progress without losing valuable hours.
