The 5 Best Time Management Secrets That You’ve Not Yet Mastered

December 16, 2013 Blogging Guide

I know, I know. The workplace is changing. We have more to do and less time to do it. Stop complaining and stop stressing. Take time management into your own hands, thus giving space to your creativity, and check out these secrets:

Importance versus Urgency

By far the most difficult time management challenge and actually the biggest secret to making the most out of your time is to focus on importance and avoid being swayed by urgency. It sounds counter intuitive and it definitely is. Most humans are hardwired to focus on things that require an immediate response, like the blinking voicemail or text message you’ve just received. These alerts on our phones are the biggest culprits, but there are countless other examples of feigned urgency, aka distraction, going on in our daily lives. When you spend time on immediately responding to trivial messages, you inevitably postpone the things that are most important. Find a way to deconstruct this permanent competition between the important and the urgent, reverse this habit, and you will feel like the master of infinite time!

Chunking

Even once you’ve mastered the biggest time management secret of working exclusively on important tasks, there is still a lot of room for improved efficiency of time whilst working on those important tasks. It’s obviously best to start with ‘To Do’ lists, but you have to be strategic about you organize such lists.

Start by immediately crossing out everything that is not important. Once you feel that your list is sufficiently prioritized, resist the urge to multi-task. Chunking is the new tactic and it’s lauded by professionals of all spheres who’ve taken the step beyond multi-tasking.

And chunking is actually just as simple as it sounds. Set aside chunks of time for specific tasks. Set up boundaries so that colleagues, loved ones, or mobile devices have less access to interrupting your chunks (while of course there will be interruptions no matter how well you chunk). The real crux of this tactic is reducing start-up moments or, in other words, that fuzzy feeling of not being sure where you left off. These start-up moments are not the most productive use of your time and unplanned tasks and interruptions proliferate this lack of productivity far more than you realize.

Once, and Only Once

This secret also relates directly to those start-up moments. Whether you receive an email, voicemail, memo, etc., only touch it once. If you are aware of your current capacity and know that you won’t have time to reply, do no open it. Only handle things when you have the time to reply. If you handle simple emails twice, you’re wasting practically twice the amount of time by handling it twice, starting-up twice, and thinking about it too much.

Learn to Say ‘No’

Spend one day taking notice of how many requests you say ‘no’ to and to how many you reply ‘yes.’ If your ratio weighs heavily on the ‘no’ side, then you’ve somehow avoided a disturbing implicit social contract that the rest of us have long ago fallen victim to. It may feel noble and satisfy our internal super hero complexes, but agreeing to slow yourself down just because someone asked you politely for help should be the exception to the rule and not the number one way that you spend your time. If this sounds to cut-throat for you, take a moment to reflect on the people you know who seem to have mastered the ‘no.’ These ‘no’ sayers somehow manage to be some of the most respected individuals in the office. This could be you.

Stick to It

Well, now that you’ve done some reflection and figured out a few totally counter intuitive time management secrets, don’t give up. Give yourself at least three weeks of intensive dedication to your prioritization, ‘To Do’ lists, chunking, and other skills so that you can build new habits. Stick to it and pass on these time management secrets to the others in your life who really need them. That will reduce the stress of having to wait for your colleague’s, partner’s, staff’s to come in late every week.

Featured images:

•  Image by Smart Photo Stock
•  Image credit MyBlogGuest.com