Do you ever get to the end of the day and say “What happened? Where did my time go?” Sometimes the time just gets away from us. Have you been saying to yourself “I want to learn how to manage my time productively”? Then you’ve come to the right place!
How to Stay Productive Throughout the Day
Are you someone who is productive during very short periods of time in the morning, but the rest of the day you tend to procrastinate and waste time? This is a very common occurrence for most people, but there are some ways to be a little more productive late in the morning until the afternoon.
Try Time Blocking
Time blocking is a great way to stay productive throughout the day, since you are managing how you spend your time and can stay on track. This method involves using different blocks of time between 1 and 3 hours on average, where you dedicate that time to one type of task.
The time period will vary based on your schedule and the task, but might look like:
- 6-6:30am – morning routine
- 6:30am-8:30am – marketing and social media
- 8:30-9am – breakfast break
- 9am-12pm – working on your blog
You can choose different parts of your day to work on different things, and balance it out between work and personal tasks. You’ll learn how to manage your time as productively as possible.
Batch Your Projects
This doesn’t mean multi-tasking and working on multiple things at one time. Instead, you want to use the work batching method, which means you do the same type of task in one batch. For example, if you have a YouTube channel, you might record multiple videos all in one long session. If you run a website for your business, you might brainstorm and research the next week’s worth of posts all in one sitting, then tomorrow, batch all the writing to be done together.
Choose When to Check Your Email
Having your email notifications open all day will steal your focus consistently, and make it really hard to stay productive. Every time you see that a new email has arrived, you are tempted to read it and possibly even respond. Don’t allow the distractions to drive how you manage your time productively.
Instead of having it open, close your email and have dedicated times during the day when you read and respond to emails. This can fit into your time blocking schedule, or just when you have free time to do so.
Go for a Walk During Your Afternoon Slump
Everyone has a slump in their day, usually around the early afternoon. This is when you tend to lose a lot of your energy and need a little pick-me-up. Instead of hitting the vending machine, consider going outside and taking a walk instead.
Plan Activities Around Your Energy Levels
It is also a good idea to be aware of when you have high or low energy during the day. During your peak work hours is of course when you should get the productive work done, especially the tasks that require a little more brain power. Then during times of the day when your energy is lower, work on answering emails, updating your website, or doing smaller tasks that don’t require as much energy.
How Being Organized Saves You Time and Money
In order to manage your time productively, you have to be able to manage your own schedule. We all want to be able to organize our schedules and have the commitment to maintain them on a day-to-day basis, but how? Creating a workable schedule is typically time-consuming and often results in a frustrating battle with your calendar.
Organization is beneficial for everyone and can be easily adapted to suit individual needs. And believe it or not, being organized in your everyday life actually saves you time and money. Here are a few of the reasons why.
Efficient and Stress-Free
If you keep your belongings organized, you don’t need to spend time looking for them when needed. This is especially handy in the case of important yet rarely used items, such as insurance or tax information.
The key to keeping things organized is to come up with a place to keep something and stick to it. If you want to keep important mail in a desk drawer, make sure you keep all of your important mail in that drawer. Don’t be afraid of sorting your things too much. The more categories of things you come up with, the easier it will be to find exactly what you need when you need it. You’re learning to manage your time productively!
Saves You from Buying New
Organization keeps you from buying items you already have, but you’ve forgotten about or lost in your household or workplace. You’re more likely to forget about a pack of rubber bands you bought several months ago and never opened, than your car keys or your wallet. Combined, these types of purchases can end up costing you a significant amount of money for items that you already have.
Fortunately, this is a very fixable problem. By cleaning and organizing the designated “junk” drawers in your home or office and making a list of all the items, you will easily find the item you’re looking for the next time you go searching. This avoids unnecessary purchases and impulsive buys at the store in the future. It’s a very flexible habit that can be applied to many aspects of your daily routine.
Helps You Remember Important Details
It can be hard to keep track of every detail when you have a lot going on in your life. Sometimes, bills can get lost in the shuffle and go unpaid, or household maintenance gets overlooked. By keeping all of your activities organized, you can get them done in a more efficient manner and you make sure that every detail is taken care of.
Saves Money on Shopping
If you plan out a menu for each month, you can buy many of your groceries in bulk, saving you time and frequent trips to the store. If you prepare a list ahead of time, you can also look for coupons that offer savings on the things you plan to buy.
The same applies to non-food items, which can be bought in bulk and stored for later use. Staying organized and keeping essentials stocked up saves you the stress of running out to make a special trip for more. You can also plan out birthday or holiday gifts well ahead of time, so that you can keep an eye out for a good deal.
While it may take a bit of effort, organizing your life allows you to use your time more efficiently and to take full advantage of your finances. Not only that, but the more thought-out your budget or schedule is, the less you will worry about them. Planning ahead ultimately helps you manage your time more productively.
Surprising Time Management Secrets
One certainty in life is that time is limited. While no one is sure how many years they’ll be given to finish doing what they want to do, everything is equal for each day you are given. Everyone has the same 24-hour day to dream, determine goals, and complete tasks that will help them meet those goals. But doesn’t it seem like some people are just better at time management than others? Surprisingly, there are some time management secrets that make you feel like you have hours more in your day.
Set Priorities – There are really only four choices:
- Most important
- Most urgent
- Least important
- Least urgent
When you identify tasks and set your priorities carefully by what is important over not important, as well as avoid having issues of urgency each day, you can get a handle on how to manage your time productively, in ways that you never thought possible.
- Learn the Power of No – Saying no is probably one of the most important things you’ll ever learn to say. The problem is our parents disciplined the word “no” from our vocabulary. It’s time to learn how to say no again. If something is not right for you, is too “urgent”, causes you stress, or you just do not want to do it and it doesn’t fit in with meeting your goals, say no. Saying no will free up untold amounts of time to focus on your priorities.
- Disconnect from Technology – Unplug the phone, turn off email notifications, and for goodness sakes get off Facebook. If you’ve not completed the most important tasks on your daily list, you have no business messing around with technology. The idea of multitasking is overrated, so unplug and tune in to the tasks at hand. You’ll work faster, smarter, and gain the time you need for other things.
- Schedule Everything – Your priorities need to be added to your calendar. Everything from the 15 minutes you need to use social media for marketing purposes, to the one hour you take your kids to the park, needs to be put into your calendar. If you have a project due in a week, you should have five days of scheduled time to work on the project prior to the due date. This helps avoid those urgencies mentioned earlier.
- Ignore Interruptions – Unless the house is on fire or a child is bleeding, the telephone ringing and the knocks on your office door are not important. They are interruptions. Check your email at scheduled times during the day, explain to your children, spouse and family when you are working, and otherwise ignore the door bell ringing. If you didn’t schedule it, you don’t need it.
- Outsource – Whether it’s the housework, cooking, or customer service, it’s important to outsource what you can afford to outsource. There are huge payoffs to outsourcing the things that are simply time suckers from your day. If you can’t afford to outsource, your kitchen will not explode if a few dishes pile up, and everyone can do with eating a salad for dinner. And, you can automate a lot of customer service issues if you work from home.
- Once and You’re Done – Multitasking is not really a bastion of efficiency. Instead, seek to touch each task only once and finish it. For example, when you check the mail immediately throw out the trash, schedule bills to be paid, and deal with any issues that came up with a letter – right then. Of course, your mail time should be scheduled as well so that you can stay on track.
- Check Your Schedule – At least twice a day, set out the time to check your schedule. Usually the morning is good and at the end of the day is good. Ensure that you have your priorities in order, add anything new to your schedule that needs to be added, and remind yourself of what is expected the next day. Checking your schedule helps you feel accomplished at the end of the day, and reminds you of what’s coming up tomorrow.
Finally, it’s important to be very serious about following your schedule and calendar. Use technology to help such as Google Calendar or Outlook, synced to your smartphone to help you remember what it is that you should be doing now, and next. It may seem geeky to be so serious about a schedule, but it’s this one factor that makes these surprising time management tips work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the priorities for managing your time?
Setting Priorities for Managing Your Time
One of the hardest parts of time management is learning how to set priorities. Sometimes it can feel like every last thing you need to do is an emergency. But the truth is, there are ways to organize your time and manage the tasks that you need to do so that you get them finished right when they need to be done without feeling overwhelmed or rushed.
- Needs to be done immediately
- Needs to be done but can take longer and needs more strategic planning
- Distractions, but needed by others
- Not at all important and often used in order to procrastinate
Use the grid to help create your daily to-do list by prioritizing the importance and urgency of each item you have to pick from. It can be as simple as doing the purple things first, then the green, next pink, and finally the light green items. But, if you do it this way you might miss out on something important you can learn from the time management grid.
How does this help me manage my time productively? When you are assessing any task, make sure you label it, then ask yourself if it fits in with your core values and goals. As you learn to use this system it will start becoming more automatic so that you can say yes or no faster and put your time management on auto drive.
What about planning for better time management?
Creating a time management plan keeps you from wasting time. Having a plan makes every hour count, ensures that you get to work more quickly and helps distribute your time over all the tasks that you need to do each day, week, month and year. Creating a time management plan is an imperative if you want to be successful.
- Be Realistic With Your Plans – Don’t go against your own internal clock when planning each day. If you know you struggle to get up in the morning, do not schedule things in the early morning hours. If you can manage in the mornings if you do tasks you like first, try that.
- Set Time Limits – This is especially important for both tasks you dislike and tasks you like. You always have a risk of procrastination when it comes to tasks you hate by spending too much time on tasks you like.
- Eliminate Distractions – One of the biggest killers of any plan that you set are distractions. While nothing is ever perfect, you can eliminate most distractions by planning ahead about how to deal with them.
- Differentiate Important from Non-Important Tasks – One of the hardest tasks when creating a time management plan is understanding what is important and what is not. If you make it a habit to do the most important things first, you’re going to feel more accomplished.
- Use a Calendar and Technology – Where would we be without technology? Using a system synced to your phone is a great way to ensure that your calendar is always with you and that you don’t forget things. You can even set reminders and alarms to help.
- Eliminate Urgency from Your Life – This can be difficult but most things really aren’t urgent. If you are a service provider, stop taking last-minute work; train your clients to give you plenty of time to work tasks into your schedule. If you set family time and play time into your schedule too, that will eliminate the need for a last-minute meltdown from the toddler too.
- Create and Use Lists – It is one thing to note on your calendar “work on project A” but it’s quite another to list exactly what you are to do during that time period on project A. This is the most effective way to schedule your time. Be very specific with lists so that no time is wasted.
- Create a Daily Action Plan – There should always be at least four or five things that you can do each day toward any future goal that you have to help you feel accomplished. Plus, having a variety of things to do each day will eliminate boredom and procrastination.
What are the best tips for time management for better productivity?
Stop doing everything yourself. That’s certainly not how to manage your time productively! Outsource your work before it’s too late. To be successful, you need to save your time and energy for what you do best. If accounting, customer service, marketing, or technology isn’t your thing outsourcing the work by finding an online freelancer is a great option to save you more time and frustration.
The following are a few areas to outsource in your life and business to save you more time:
- Making hotel reservations or booking meetings and other appointments.
- Social media, email, and other marketing projects and tasks.
- Laundry, cleaning, and other housework or maintenance.
- Content writing, administrative or human resource tasks such as payroll.
- Customer service and support.
- Shopping and dry cleaning.
- Other repetitive, time-consuming, and frustrating tasks.
What to outsource depends on what you need the most, what you can afford, and what goals you are looking to accomplish. Ask yourself this one simple question to get started: “What takes up most of my time?” Then decide from there if it something someone else could be doing for you instead.
Depending on your needs, there are many different platforms to choose from online to hire independent contractors to do various tasks from content writing, social media marketing, answering phone calls from customers, sending out emails on your behalf, or even delivering your groceries other materials.