How to Improve Time Management Skills 7 Amazing Tips

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Art of Time Management: How to improve time management skills?

Imagine having control of time, it would be chaos and relief at the same time. Shortage of time is always a problem for everyone. We all have the same 24 hours in a day but there is a great economic and productive diversity at the same time management provides us the liberty to control 24 hours span of a day to generate maximum productivity. Let us learn how to improve time management skills.

What is management composed of?

According to Harold Koontz “management is the art of getting things done through others and with formally organized groups”.

F.W. Talyor stated that “Management is the art of knowing what you want to do and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest manner”.

One of the greatest American Management authors George R. Terry stated in answering how to improve time management skills that “ Management is a distinct process consisting of planning, organizing, actuating and controlling; utilizing in each both science and art, and followed in order to accomplish predetermined objectives”.

All these definitions tell us that management is the art of getting control of things and casting them according to our needs. It is very helpful in providing the speed of functioning to achieve desirable goals. The to-do list is a great example of management, if you know what you have to do on the prior day then you don’t have to worry about the tasks for the next day. Now let’s move on to how to improve time management skills.

How to improve time management skills

Time Management skills

In answer to the question how to improve time management skills? Warren Buffett quoted that “the rich invest in time, the poor invest in the money”. 

We use to come across a saying that” Time is Money”. You can truly understand this saying at a time when you have a shortage of it. Time management and how to improve time management skills provide stability in our chaotic lifestyle and give us control of our life on our own.

Time management is considered as a way of prioritizing your work and eliminating plenty of hurdles that come in your way of achieving goals. Time management can be defined as the ability to assign your precious time to tasks and manage the timeline of 24 hours to get more productivity.

There are 5 key elements of how to improve time management skills:

  • Conducive Environment: it is considered the key driver for economic growth. It helps a person to create space, increasing comfort, incentivizing, and omitting bad vibes.   
  • Priorities: setting a goal for priorities helps us to eliminate unnecessary tasks and give that time to focus on other tasks.  
  • Goal setting: setting a goal at a particular timeline can give us an account of increasing productivity and provide a better pace of work.  
  • Habits: indulging in good habits can improve the quality of life and give you a great mindset to achieve your goals.
  • Perseverance: it can be defined as the continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties and failures. It would provide a sense of accomplishment of tasks with great thinking. 

Importance of Time Management

Importance Of Time Management

How to improve time management skills can be understood as the ability to assign time and organize tasks according to the goals. It may come to your mind why is it so important to do this and how to improve time management skills? There are some factors that can explain the importance of time management in our lives: 

  • Productivity enhancement 
  • Low-stress levels
  • Life and career orientation
  • Maintaining a good reputation professionally

These factors talk about making life easy going with great productivity and accomplishment of self-satisfaction. But there are undesirable consequences that can become a hurdle in your timeline while not managing your time :

  • Low quality of work
  • Higher stress level
  • Making career problems
  • Inefficiency in work

Punctuality is a problem for 80% of the total population, for many people, it seems that there is never enough time to do everything they want. When you know how to improve time management skills it will lead to control of what you want in your life and what are your life goals.

Techniques for how to improve time management skills:

  • Goal setting: to manage time effectively, you have to set a goal and give a deadline. Without a goal, there is no point in doing things. According to your goals, you can adjust the priorities of your life.  
  • Prioritization: things that need to be done according to the desired goals can be done by prioritizing things. 
  • Managing interference: there are many interruptions that will lead to a slow working process and finally affect the goals. To conquer this feeling you have to be always prepared.
  • Scheduling: the most important aspect of managing time. When you know your goals and priorities you have to schedule them according to attain maximum productivity.  
  • Procrastination: the feeling of eluding things or processes for the next time can be very atrocious for your time management and goals. The best way to deal with it is to commit to the goals. 
  • Knowledge of how you spend your time: having a time log is a very helpful method to figure out how you are using your time. Begin with recording what you are doing for 30 minutes intervals for a week. 
  • Use a planning tool
  • Get organized
  • Take help from others
  • Manage time wasters
  • Stay healthy and motivated 

General time management tools for how to improve time management skills: 

  • Activity Logs
  • To-do list
  • Action Programs
  • Costing your time
  • Multitasking
  • Leverage
  • Managing E-files and Emails

How to improve Time Management Skills: Strategies

General Time Management Strategies

Acquiring efficient goals within the time limit can be very tricky and need some strategies. To accomplish them you need to be well-oriented and know when and how to do things. There are some strategies that we would like to share with you to boost your time management.

  • The ABC analysis: this technique allows you to arrange your tasks according to priority. You can prioritize your tasks into three categories:-

A – Tasks that are urgent.
B – Tasks that are important but not Urgent
C – Tasks that are neither important nor urgent.

This technique allows you to take an overview of all the tasks and prioritize the tasks according to their needs. But there is a disadvantage of this technique that you would face i.e it is not an in-depth analysis and not as precise as other techniques.  

  • Scaling from 1-10: Prioritizing things via scale from most important being 1 to least important being 10. The advantage of this technique is that it can be done in a very short amount of time.
  • Pareto Analysis: Also known as the 80-20 method, this method is based on the idea that we can accomplish 80% of our tasks within 20% of our available time and complete 20% of the remaining task in the remaining 80% of the time.
  • Monitoring:  Monitoring enables you to figure out the amount of time you spend on different tasks as well as – which is more important – it allows you to recognize the amount of time you spend on ineffective activities. You are able to monitor yourself by producing an activity report where you note down your activities, the time that it has taken, and the value of these activities. Once you’ve monitored your own behavior for a couple of days you are able to begin analyzing it and if needed reduce or eliminate unimportant activities.
  • Allen’s Input Processing Technique: David Allen’s input processing technique is a framework that helps in keeping the track of tasks and ideas. It consists of three main processes i.e collecting, processing, and reviewing.

Also read: 10 Best Ways to Manage your Anger 

How to improve time management skills: Factors

Apart from the above-stated things, one of the creative and important factors which will help you in answering how to improve time management skills and increase productivity in the sense of time management would be time management skills. 

  • Setting up smart goals: setting up attainable, specific, time-bound, and relevant goals is the key to managing time. This will lead to effective planning with clear objectives as well as good productivity.  
  • Stress management: there are plenty of circumstances that would act as unnecessary strain to you and your work. Make sure you manage your stress with stress-relieving strategies and tactics in order to feel more relaxed.  
  • Proper task delegation: choosing tasks of great importance is very important. It will help you to ease the workload and increase your performance. 
  • Saying “NO”: indulging with other tasks when your own tasks are pending leads to a waste of time and resources. Saying NO to unnecessary tasks will save you time for your own priorities. 

How to improve time management skills: Techniques

Time Management Techniques

Technique is defined as a particular way of doing things or the practical skill that somebody has in a particular activity. To attain maximum productivity there are some time management techniques that we would like to share with you. 

Kanban

Let us discuss the 1st technique of how to improve time management skills. This is a visual time management technique that helps you to follow the progress with your tasks. This technique was developed by Taiichi Ohno for Toyota Automotive, in Japan in 1940. It is used in solving the issues of multitasking, missed deadlines, and ineffective scheduling and improves effective planning, smart goals and proper task delegation.
This can be done by using software, using paper and pen, or via sticky notes. First, determine the number of stages in your tasks or project according to their importance. 

  • Backlog: basics of your tasks. What are those? Then arrange them in the order of priority. 
  • To Do: in this, you have to select the tasks you have to work on. 
  • In progress: tasks that you are currently working on.
  • Lastly, Done: this will have the tasks that you have completed.

Eat that Frog

Let us discuss the 2nd technique of how to improve time management skills. The aim of this technique is to prioritize tasks. You pick out your most important, or worst task (this is your “frog”), and tackle it first thing tomorrow. Once you have finished with your “frog”, you can move on to other tasks for the day, but not before.

  • Task A – the most important task, the one you should tackle first, or suffer the consequences.
  • Task B – the second most important task, the one you should tackle after Task A. Less important, but still vital.
  • Task C – a task you could do, but you wouldn’t suffer consequences if you didn’t do it.
  • Task D – a task you should ideally delegate to someone else, and allocate this time to Task A.
  • Task E – a task you don’t really need to do, so you’re free to eliminate it.

Timeboxing

Let us discuss the 3rd technique of how to improve time management skills. In this technique, you assign time periods(time-boxes) to tasks; you work within that time period and then stop once the time rams out. This can be done by the way mentioned below.

  • Layout all your activities and tasks on a list.
  • Decide what you want to accomplish with these tasks – define your goals.
  • If a task is important and requires great focus, allocate a longer time period to it (for example, 1 or 2 hours).
  • 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.
  • Start from your first task, and work your way down.
  • When the allocated time for a task is up, stop working on it.
  • Take a break.
  • Review what you’ve managed to accomplish.
  • Turn your
    attention to other time boxes in your schedule. 

Time Blocking

Let us discuss the 4th technique of how to improve time management skills. This time management technique is popularized by a very popular personality- Elon Musk. in this technique you block out time for a specific task and work on it during this time period. There are 4 stages to Time Blocking:

  • The planning stage: Define your tasks and activities, identify priorities
  • The blocking stage: Assign each task with a specific time block – number of minutes or hours, with specific days, start and end times noted in your calendar. The time block can be shorter, for example, 10 minutes, or longer, for example, 90 minutes. This depends on the priority level of the task. Block more time for priority tasks; also, allocate these tasks to the time of day when you’re the most productive. Block your less productive time of the day for less important tasks. Note everything in a calendar: the day, the start time, and the end time.
  • The acting stage: Start working on the first daily task (usually your priority task). Work your way down your schedule. Take breaks between time blocks, and schedule these breaks.
  • The revision stage: If you see a task takes longer or shorter than you estimated, revise the schedule for other tasks you’ve planned for that day.

Who’s Got the Monkey

Let us discuss the 5th technique of how to improve time management skills. The emphasis of this method is on delegating tasks and is mostly aimed at project managers, though others can make use of it as well. Monkeys are tasks, and you have to consider how to deal with them.

There are 3 types of “monkeys” and managed time:

  • Boss-imposed time: activities the boss required.
  • System-imposed time: colleagues’ requests and questions.
  • Self-imposed time: the actions you decide to undertake. You may use it for your own tasks and ideas (discretionary time), or to tackle subordinates’ problems and requests (subordinate-imposed time).

To-Do List

Let us discuss the 6th technique of how to improve time management skills. This technique will help in effective planning and stress management. In this technique, you have to write the completed tasks instead of the tasks that have to be done within a certain amount of time. In this technique, there are three main steps:

  • At the end of each workweek, take 10-15 minutes to note down everything you’ve accomplished.
  • Next to each item include what you’ve learned while working on it.
  • Also for each item, note what you could do differently next time, to improve your results.

To-Don’t list

Let us discuss the 7th technique of how to improve time management skills. A contrast to the classical To-do List – you list all the tasks and activities you won’t do. This technique work in the ways mentioned below: 

  • You make a list before each workday.
  • Note in all the tasks, ideas, and habits you’ll aim NOT to do, or think about.
  • This can be distractions, overly ambitious ideas you objectively have no time to work on or bad habits you want to quit.
  • Include the word “Don’t” in front of each listed item.
  • Cross over each item at the end of the day if you’ve managed to avoid it.

Also read: (10 Best Ways to Manage your Anger | Data Trained)

Time Management Apps for how to improve Time Management Skills?

Time Management Apps

In today’s modern era, digitization is taking place all over the world. To save time, updated versions of software and apps are launching almost every day. So, to save your time in finding the best apps for how to improve time management skills, are available on android, ios and desktop, we would like you to go through this list: 

As mentioned above, time management is the ability to control things in order to get maximum productivity. To manage the time and answer how to improve time management skills, you need some particular techniques, skills, and strategies that will enhance your performance and productivity. 

DataTrained Course for how to improve Time Management Skills. 

Time management course

What you will be learning in this course by DataTrained that gives you a complete solution for how to improve your time management skills? 

  • This course will provide you with a deep understanding of time management. 
  • Provide a plan according to your profession. 
  • Improve your productivity level by implementing new strategies and techniques. 
  • Provide solutions to deal with procrastination. 

The main goal of this course is to provide you with a better understanding of how to improve time
management skills, help you in boosting your productivity, and present time management as a skill to achieve success by providing practice tests and 2+ hours of learning. This course would be conducted by Ms. Aakrity Yadav with mock tests and 2+ hours of online sessions in the respective field. 

Join a Time management course by Data Trained and improve your Time Management skills. You’ll also get the certification of completion of the course. Through this course, you will learn how to improve time management skills.

Check out the course at The Art of Managing Time.

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