7 Steps to Better Time Management

Good time management is a a fundamental part of successfully working on your goals. From my own experience, I know that planning out personal or professional goals requires a good amount of discipline. The reason is simple: you really have to budget your time well to get all the things done that you would like to do. Effectiveness when it comes to time management is an integral part of achieving success, in fact it’s essential, both on a personal and professional level. Endless stress and always feeling overextended are often a result of lacking time management skills, which clearly stands in the way of your happiness.  

How about taking part in our time management challenge? Every day you complete a small assignment – this will help you to set up a good routine for yourself and develop new habits for better time management at the same time? Click here or enter AUV SUC 8ST in Goalify Connect!

Below you’ll find a list of my tips for efficient time management:

Find out how long things take

It can be helpful for you to track your time for a while, so that you can establish how much time you spend on different activities. Then you can analyze where you’re spending most of your time as well as identify which activities don’t take up a lot of time. You can either just make a note of where your time goes, or you can use Goalify to record how much time you’re putting into working on your goals you’ve planned out for yourself. You should also record your breaks along with any time you spend on distractions.

Set priorities

Go through your activities and think about whether or not all the things you’re doing actually deserve your time. A good filtering tool to use here is simply ranking things into three categories, for example A - B - C, where you use A for “very important”, B for “somewhat important” and C for “not important”. This will make it easier for you to develop a strategy for getting things done and creating a plan for the days ahead.

Plan enough

Make a weekly plan and a daily plan, because planning is honestly half the battle! If you decide what you’re going to invest your time in beforehand and make a plan, you’ll likely encounter fewer stressful situations in the future. You can easily set up daily or weekly plans in Goalify so you always have an overview of your goals. You can find out how to do this here.

Personal performance curve

Pay attention to when you are most productive, and try to assign specific tasks to these times. Some people are at their best in the morning, and some do their best work later in the day. If you know when it’s easier for you to do good work, then you can set up your time management in a way that’s optimal for you.

Break projects down into small steps

Every project that you take on should be divided up into the smallest possible steps. You plan how much time you want to spend on every step that moves you toward your larger goal. That’s a good way to make your projects seem less daunting, and at the same time you can better estimate just how long you’ll need to complete whatever it is that you want to do. If more time is required for one of your interim goals, you’ll know in advance that the overall goal will take longer to achieve – that way you can adjust your plans so that everything still works out well in the end.

 Set milestones

Evaluate

After reaching each milestone or intermediate goal, you should take a close look at what went well along with what didn’t go so well. When you take the time to do this, you both analyze the processes you use for moving forward and optimize your systems. This means that you actually improve even more when it comes to your time management skills, and as a result the next milestone will be easier to reach.