We all have time 24 hours a day, some people do great things, some can balance work and life, some feel that time is meaningless. Why is that? Yes, the only difference here is each person’s time management skills.
If you are wondering how to increase your productivity at work, let’s explore time management skills with Malu through the following article.
What is time management skill?
Time management skills can be considered as a combination of important skills, helping you to manage and use your time well every day.
Some time management skills include:
- Organizational skills
- Targeting Skills
- Administration skills
- Planning skills
- Skills to manage pressure and stress
Not only having the ability to actively control personal life, people who know how to manage their time are always very popular with employers.
Because in addition to the ability to manage time, they also have gathered enough other related skills in organizing and completing work to become a potential employee. They are expected to ensure good productivity and bring the positive value that the company is aiming for.
Importance of time management at work</ strong>
Increasing productivity
One of the biggest advantages of time management skills is that it allows us to be more productive by taking control of the time we spend.
From there, you can better focus on important tasks, leading to better efficiency at work.
Achieve the goal
The great advantage of time management skills is that it allows you to achieve greater success in your efforts – even in a quick and efficient way.
It also helps you make more effective decisions, and be able to distinguish and prioritize important tasks in your workflow.
Easy to manage team work
The work will be more complicated and difficult to control when you participate in group work, or directly manage a certain team.
Time management skills at this time will bring into full play their potential, helping you to arrange all day schedules smoothly. You will receive a lot of trust from your teammates, as well as help your team quickly complete the goal.
Reduce stress
Have you ever had to eat while moving on the road, so busy that you have no time for personal hobbies, family time or not?
Going around in the middle of work is also stupid, making your life stressful and stressful. And the cause of this constant recurrence is your lack of time management skills.
When you know how to organize your time, balance between work and rest, the “stress” will also ease.
Time management skills help you get new opportunities in life
Not knowing how to use your time properly will destroy your productivity. This will cause you to miss many job opportunities.
12 How to develop simple time management skills that effective
1. Make a To-Do List – The Key to Effective Time Management
Have you ever gone shopping but then got tempted and brought home a bunch of unrelated stuff? Making a list, whether it’s a grocery list or a to-do list, helps you bring your priorities together in one place.
Start your day with a to-do-list, visualize what needs to be done today, and complete it one by one. Small but martial, this will help you practice habits and develop extremely good time management skills.
The list helps you determine the route, destination as well as the GPS locator. You can write in notebooks, notes or use applications in your phone, as long as you always carry it with you to easily track work progress. And yet, nothing is more wonderful and proud than the feeling of crossing off the completed tasks one by one, right?
2. Focus on the things that really matter
Once you have your to-do list in hand, the next equally important skill is to prioritize them for time management.
Consider the urgency, difficulty, and value of the job. Take the time to focus on what’s important first, and you’ll be able to enjoy the rest of the day.
A report that needs to be submitted by tomorrow is of course more important than scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or going out for a beer with coworkers. Prioritize the things that bring high value and most importantly, don’t forget to take note of the timelines and complete them ahead of time.
3. Building a minimalist lifestyle
Be honest, have you ever wanted to start working but couldn’t find the documents you needed? Do you spend an hour rummaging through the room and when you find it, the inspiration to work is gone?
Please clean the room neatly, throw away all documents, unimportant papers, arrange the data files in the computer logically. If you spend too much time thinking about what to wear tomorrow, you can try to find basic clothes that are easy to coordinate.
Simplifying your life not only helps you practice your management skills, organize your work optimally, but also save time and focus more on other important things.
4. Make the most of your free time
Every second that passes can be used to do something useful. You absolutely can find “holes” in your busy schedule, such as time in the bathroom, time in the car to get to work, or time waiting for your friend at the appointment.
On the bus to work, instead of just sitting idly watching the street, you can listen to the morning news or Podcast about your profession. The meeting ended 15 minutes earlier than planned? Use it to check your email, review your to-do-list to track your progress. Even waiting time for a partner at the appointment is enough for you to make a few phone calls to your customers.
5. No delay
Did you know that successful people have 7 days a week, and lazy people only have 7 tomorrows? So, don’t wait for the excitement to do it, don’t wait for the deadline to open the laptop, and don’t wait for the boss to remind you to scowl at the desk.
Be very hard on yourself, because procrastination only makes your day-to-day productivity decrease and your mood always full of fear.
Slowly but surely is still better, do it a little bit every day but with better quality until the 90th minute to get up and do it through the speakers.
And of course, after completing the work, you will have more motivation to continue planning, new goals and know how to arrange to achieve it. Time management skills are also therefore honed by you day by day.
6. Know yourself to set a suitable time budget
Each person will have their own circadian rhythm, some people work more efficiently in the morning, others focus better in the afternoon. Unlike the tight hours at work, one of the plus points of working remotely is that you can choose the most effective time for you.
You can wake up at 8 a.m., cook breakfast, go to the gym, and then get to work. It is important to understand yourself.
Once you have identified the “golden time frame”, put the important tasks to be handled at that time, use your management and organization skills to organize, save time and improve efficiency. .
7. Get everything organized
Have you ever rummaged through the room looking for a set of documents, or lost an hour because you couldn’t remember where the client’s contract file was on your computer? Obviously, keeping everything in order will save you a lot of stress and save you a ton of time.
Keeping things organized is also an important part of time management skills.
Clean up your computer, categorize related categories and duplicates into one file. Don’t forget to delete unnecessary things. That way, you’ll easily find whatever you need right away.
8. Long-term planning
Honestly, have you ever thought that working remotely means you can do it if you like it, if you don’t like it, you can relax whenever you want? That’s right, you can. However, this inspired way of working will take you a long time because nothing is done to the end.
Planning when to work and when to rest is essential for your time management skills.
Start the morning by going through your list of tasks for the day, then focus on completing them according to predetermined timelines. Weekly and monthly plans will help you prioritize tasks and not miss any deadlines.
9. Remove distractions
It is true that working from home is more comfortable, but it is also a trap that distracts us. No one can calculate data, edit documents if they keep staring at the TV screen every 5 minutes. And it would be inconvenient if the Facebook message notification bell kept ringing all day.
So, to manage your time effectively, you should find yourself a quiet workspace, turn off all social media notifications as well as put your phone away. Get rid of distractions and focus completely on your work.
10. Learn to say “no”
You know, time is gold. But you don’t have much time and not all work can generate “gold”.
Remember, juggling too many tasks at once will only make you exhausted and always in a state of stress.
You have the right to refuse meaningless chat appointments, nor should you accept someone’s help when your job is not done. Your knowledge, skills, and especially your time should be managed and used for valuable work.
11. Learn to manage time every day
As a basic skill, the fact that you can manage your time every day will definitely be learned.
Let’s start with the tips, how to free time management course. After applying you will find yourself suitable / not suitable for any method.
Trial and error, from which to learn to apply later is the most sustainable way to learn new skills.
12. Read books on time management methods
If you still don’t know how to manage effectively, you can also learn from the experts to build an overview for yourself – before you start “practising”.
Here are some highly recommended books on how to develop time management skills:
- The 4-Hour Workweek – Tim Ferriss: Shows you how time management skills can help you work just 4 hours a week and still have your life. live successfully.
- Getting Things Done – David Allen: If you’re often stressed and can’t get things done, this is the book for you
- First Things First – Stephen Covey: An overview of how to identify what matters and plan to do it.
- Priorities: Mastering Time Management – James C. Petty: A guide to prioritizing and making time for what’s important.
- The One Minute Manager – Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson: Time Management for Managers.
Some Scientific methods to help train time management skills
Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix is a time management framework by prioritizing by classifying work tasks according to two properties: urgency and importance. Accordingly:
- Mission Important: Contribute to your personal and professional long-term mission, goals, and values. They may not produce immediate results, but by focusing on important tasks, you feel calm, logical, and receptive to new ideas due to your sharp mind.
- Urgent mission: Quite time-sensitive, requires immediate attention, and often involves collective work, other individuals rather than just yourself. myself. You feel compelled to deal with them.
Based on the above definition, the Eisenhower matrix will help you divide your tasks into 4 categories:
- Urgent and important (must do immediately).
- Important but not urgent (plan it later).
- Urgent but not important (should entrust, hand over to others).
- Neither urgent nor important (mission must be eliminated).
By applying the above categorization to your time management skills, you can focus on increasing your productivity and efficiency, as well as eliminating unimportant, time-wasting tasks.
Pareto working principle (80/20)
This principle was developed by the famous Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto for the purpose of productivity management.
The Pareto Principle is applied based on the following hypothesis: about 80% of the effects are caused by 20% of the causes.
So, the main thing we need to do is learn how to apply time management skills and then focus on 20% of efforts to bring 80% of the work results.
In a nutshell, you will have to select the 2 most important tasks, with a greater impact than the other 8 items – instead of procrastinating it and just working on inefficient tasks wasting time. time.
You can use the following formula to determine the order of work priorities: ratio between effort and achievement.
4D Method: Do – Delete – Delegate – Defer
Similar to the Eisenhower 4D Matrix of time management, the 4D method – sometimes referred to as the 4 Ds of productivity – is a simple and universal strategy to help you determine the importance of your work. work that takes time to complete.
It involves making quick decisions about what needs immediate action (Do – Do), or delegating it to someone else (Delegate – Delegating) .
For less important things, you can choose to delay it (Defer – Delay) and even remove it if you feel it is unnecessary (Delete – Delete). quit) to save your time.
Pickle Jar Theory
The “pickle jar” theory is a simple and really useful time management solution. Basically, this theory is based on the idea that time is like a jar of pickles and has a deadline.
This theory helps you identify the important and the unimportant on your to-do list – in a visual way.
The jar represents your day. Accompanied by grains of sand, pebbles, stones and water to fill the melon jar. You will put in your jar in the following order to learn how to prioritize and plan your day:
- The Stone: The most important task of the day (must do first).
- The Pebble: The next big thing (including one that can be delegated).
- Grain of Sand: Small, miscellaneous jobs.
- Water: Time for private life – family and friends.
After you have classified the tasks, you should make a schedule and organize them in a way that suits your needs and goals. This is also an important key for you to practice time management skills.
Read more: Don’t forget work-life balance
Conclusion
Finally, after a busy day at work, look back and summarize what you did and did not do in the past 24 hours. Human time is limited, but with these tips, Malu surely you will I feel proud that I didn’t waste it.
