Effective Time Management Tips To Reduce Stress, Improve Productivity & Live In Harmony
Effective time management can help you avoid a stressful life. Take this time management advice to heart, try out these suggestions, and practice them until they become a habit. They will revolutionize your personal life and bring greater joy and fulfilment into your work.
So, you’re drowning under a deluge of work and overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of projects you are being asked to handle… and there’s more pouring in every day!
- Can you feel the pressure building up?
- Are you experiencing higher stress levels day by day?
- Are your personal life, health and relationships suffering because of this?
Let’s put a stop to this nonsense – and learn how to reclaim your life once again!
With some simple tips for effective time management, you can turn the clock back and return to a peaceful, stress-free lifestyle – where you still manage to get everything done, just without the anxiety and frustration thrown in.
Ready to learn how? Great.
1. Start By Planning
Make a daily plan. It can help set the tone for your new life of relaxed enjoyment.
Knowing what you have to do today can give you a sense of control and well-being. Prepare your to-do list every morning (or better still, last thing at night) and keep your highest priority tasks at the top.
This keeps you from wandering off-track, chasing less important trivia and wasting time putting out fires, while critical tasks remain undone.
2. Set Priorities
- Does stuff that’s urgent demand your attention?
- Do tasks that are high priority for someone else tend to get pushed off onto you?
- Is a person or something constantly distracting you from work?
It’s time to fix that – by setting your own priorities on tasks.
When you know what is most important to you, you will be able to devote more time and energy to getting it done – and avoid wasting it on anything else.
3. Turn Down Work
If someone else wants your help with a task, but your own high priority jobs aren’t complete, you must learn to say “No” – and do it firmly.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself floundering about wasting your time handling other people’s chores.
4. Delegate Tasks
Take a look at each item on your to-do list.
- Is it something that you need to do yourself?
- Is there someone on your team who can do it better?
If you can hand over your tasks to others, do it – because you’ll be free to concentrate on other things.
5. Do Quality Work
If you don’t have time to do it well, how will you find time to do it over again?
While it might take a bit longer to do a good and thorough job, it will still save you time over fixing what’s broken and correcting errors later on.
That’s effective time management.
6. Chunk Down Tasks
Looking at a large and complex project encourages procrastination. You tend to shy away from taking on a new task, and put it off as long as possible.
To avoid this delay, break down complex projects into a series of smaller tasks – and get started on the first one right away.
7. Review Your Performance
An effective time management secret it to frequently review your progress.
Keeping a time log or worksheet will show you exactly how long you’ve been working on specific tasks. When you have records for a week, review them to see if your time is effectively used.
You will definitely find areas for improvement. By constantly tweaking your process and reviewing progress, you will soon become an efficient time manager.
8. Retain Focus
Shiny new things distract you from your work. Once broken, your concentration is difficult to restore, and it sometimes results in completely abandoning a project.
So to practice effective time management, block out time needed for projects and fiercely guard it against distractions. For important projects, you might refuse to see visitors, turn off the phone, and ignore emails or messages until it’s done.
9. Stay Healthy
Sleep well. Eat nutritious food. Exercise regularly.
All of this may seem out of place in a discussion about efficient time management.
But the truth is that when you are healthy, energized and fit, you’ll breeze through even difficult tasks with little delay or waste.
By adopting these techniques to effective time management, you will transform your level of success quickly and easily. Your stress levels will drop, your productivity will soar, and you’ll discover that you have enough time to deal with all the tasks on your priority list.
Time Management Tao teaches a method of managing time that is based on 3 timeless principles that lead you to harmony and inner peace. You’ll discover how to
- Find your center – know WHAT to do
- Understand your order – know HOW to do it
- Pick your timing – know WHO to use & WHEN
And for more timely updates on effective time management, join the “Time Taozine” by registering your name and email address below – for free.
2 Effective Time Management Tips
Let’s talk about 2 effective time management tips that will transform your life and free up hours in your busy day to focus on other important activities.
Effective Time Management Tip #1
Automation
We live in a technologically advanced world. There is technology that can help with practically anything – including stretching your time. No, we’re not talking about a time machine that slows or speeds up time itself, but about harnessing the power of technology to automate things.
If you’re just starting out and can’t afford to hire people to help you out, you might consider automating some tasks using technology. Email autoresponders are one such tool. By pre-loading them with a sequence of follow up messages, you can run your customer follow up process entirely hands-free.
This lets you communicate effectively, and one-on-one, with prospects, customers, clients, co-workers or students through email – even without having to invest hours and hours on personalization and checking email obsessively every few minutes.
Similar technology is available for faxing responses to people who call a number. Recorded phone messages played back to callers is another such example.
Particularly of interest to home business owners running a business on the Internet is the knowledge of how even multi-million dollar operations can be managed by a handful of ’employees’.
Simple Solutions Are Most Effective
Effective time management tips are not always complex or costly. Some of them can be implemented very inexpensively, and literally overnight. All it takes is some research, planning and access to technology.
For example, the entire process of ordering, processing payments and delivering digital products can be set to be hands-off, leaving you with a time saving of several minutes to hours every day.
If a particular task in your daily routine is taking up a lot of time, it is worthwhile investing time and effort to try and find a way to automate it. That focus on automation will be among very effective time management tips which, over a longer period, will pay off richly in terms of time saved.
Effective Time Management Tip #2
Punctuality
On a trip to Switzerland, what stood out in addition to the lovely, scenic country was the near-perfect adherence to a time schedule. Punctuality seemed to be the watchword by which the entire nation lived!
We spent an idyllic 5 days in Lucerne, Interlaken and Zurich. One thing that stood out was the obsessive punctuality – in everything.
Train time-tables were printed out in 2 minute time-frames… which were met every time. In all, we made around 42 different transits, from train, to bus, to ferry, to cable-car… and only in one case was the departure time over 30 SECONDS later than displayed in the printed time-table!
This machine-like precision allowed us to squeeze the maximum benefit from our limited holiday, and we visited more places than we could have if the time schedule had been more sloppy – or ‘normal’!
That’s the effective time management principle we’re striving to implement in our own lives and work. Punctuality in everything you do will save you time.
Time that’s better spent on more important things. That lets you plan out your day or week with more confidence. Time that allows you to fit in more action into your crowded day.
This can completely transform your level of success and remove any anxiety or frustration from your work.
What’s The Most Effective Time Management Skill
The most effective time management skill is one which can transform your level of success, skyrocket your productivity and turn you into a hyper-efficient worker. And there’s just one skill that fits the bill. It’s called delegating work you’re not excellent at doing.
Here’s a great time management tip. Find the areas you are indispensable – and spend more time on them.
Many people – professionals, entrepreneurs, business owners, and other workers – have the same flawed way of thinking. They want to do it all by themselves. They are convinced in their minds that they can do it best, and that no one else can do it as well.
This makes them nervous about letting others handle it. That’s a silly way to run a professional practice, a business – or your life. Unless you are perfectly happy being a slave to your work. If you’re not, then it’s time to learn and practice the most effective time management skill.
Focus on your strengths, delegate your weaknesses.
Your success as an entrepreneur hinges on your ability to correctly define your areas of weakness – and surround yourself with others who are strong in these areas.
Let’s say you are a creative genius with excellent marketing skills – but you suck at math or accounting. Have a strong finance person manage your accounts and enjoy 2 big advantages:
- you get top quality expertise in your weak zones
- you get more time to concentrate on your strong spots
Of many skills and values you bring to the table – at work, at home, in your business, in your life, anywhere – there are some that are uniquely yours. No one else can match you. You simply are best at it – and others are not. Those are areas you should focus on.
But there are also many parts of your work that anyone (or at least someone) can do equally well, if not better than you. Those are areas where you must practice the most effective time management skill.
Identify these things. Then STOP doing them yourself. Delegate these tasks to others – leaving you with more time to focus on the critical parts you do best.
- Do you think your business will grow faster this way?
- Can you see your life getting better following this prescription?
- Do you think you’ll have more spare time and less stress?
Here’s the solution…
The key here is in defining what your areas of weakness are – and that isn’t always easy.
The next thing is to identify competent people to fortify these chinks in your armour.
But those can be learned and practiced once you believe that it’s the most effective time management skill that will multiply your impact and turbocharge your efficiency.
Delegating work to the person or resource best capable of handling it is one of the 3 tenets of the Time Management Tao system which is based on learning how to
- Find your center – know WHAT to do
- Understand your order – know HOW to do it
- Pick your timing – know WHO to use & WHEN
There are many other ways you can enhance your ability to manage time, and you’ll learn them on other sections of this site and in the Ming Vase Time Management guides. To stay updated about new information and time managing tips, you can subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter, “Time Taozine“.
