By: Moira Du
Picture this. You’re learning how to juggle for the first time. You think to yourself that this shouldn’t be that hard, that you don’t need tutorials or help. So, you take these three objects and toss them up in the air. You try to juggle all three but, they all go toppling down. You do it again and again and each time, you refuse help. No matter how hard you try though, you can’t seem to get it right. Juggling is harder than you thought it would be.
Think of these balls as something that represents three things: your personal life, the very long to-do list that awaits you at home, and your career. Imagine having to juggle all three of those things. Just like juggling, it will be hard but not impossible. So, how do you do it? How do you juggle all three and manage to live a good life? The answer is time management.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can best manage your time so you don’t have to worry about the frustrations that often come with stress.
What is time management?
Let’s start with a recap. What is time management anyway? Time management means, as the name suggests, to manage your time efficiently and properly so you have a good work/life balance.
How do you manage your time?
It’s not going to be as easy as you think it is so, we’ll show you how you can manage your time.
1. Write down your goals.
Having goals gives you something to work towards. It guides you to make the right decisions for yourself and to decide how you spend your time.
Start with a big goal. What do you want to achieve in the long run? Do you want to become a pediatrician or a writer for the New York Times? Do you want to run a business? Once you’ve set your big goal, you can create smaller goals to work towards that. Start with a 1-year goal. What do you want to achieve in 1 year? Then, you can go smaller. What do you want to achieve in 6 months? In 1 month? 1 week?
2. Make a to-do list.
Assuming you’ve already written down your goals, it’s time to make a to-do list. Remember how I told you that goals help you decide how you spend your time? Well, this is it. Now that you have your goals, you can write down the steps you have to take to achieve said goals. That is what you call a to-do list.
Write down what you have to do today. Write as many tasks down as you want and make sure you have this list within reach at all times. This helps you make sure that you don’t lose time over wondering what you have to do for the day and it makes sure that you don’t forget to do something.
3. Learn to prioritize.
Now that you have your to-do list, you can start prioritizing tasks. Which tasks do you need to finish first? Put off non-urgent tasks and do those later. Make sure you start doing important tasks first. This will ensure you’re not wasting your time over something that doesn’t need to be done just yet. It doesn’t mean you won’t do it. It simply means you’ve redirected your focus on other more important tasks.
4. Don’t take too many breaks.
Procrastination gets us all. To avoid this, do not take too many breaks. The most difficult part about working is getting in the zone. By ‘the zone’, I mean that place where you just can’t do anything but work. It’s that place where you are so focused that you lose sense of the world around you.
When you take a break, you’re snapped out of this reverie and brought back to a world with tons of distractions. Do not take too many breaks every few minutes or even every hour because it will be very difficult to get back in the zone.
How can you use time management in the workplace?
Why should you be learning to manage your time? Have you wasted a few minutes of your life reading this article? The short answer is no. Let me tell you why.
1. It helps you feel less overwhelmed.
One of the reasons why people are often so stressed and overwhelmed is because they do not know how to manage their time. They’re juggling so many things at once that some of these things tend to overlap. Once you learn to prioritize important tasks first, stop procrastinating, and manage your time efficiently, you’ll see that you feel less overwhelmed. You’re slowly but surely going through that long to-do list.
2. It helps you stay organized and finish work before deadlines.
Managing time also helps you stay organized and finish work before deadlines. Once you manage your time, you learn to do work immediately and to finish the most important work first. This will impress your boss.
3. It helps you submit quality outputs.
Finally, there’s no need to rush any tasks because you have enough time to do every one of them well. Therefore, the tasks and outputs that you submit to your boss will be high-quality ones.
The Takeaway
A lot of us may think that we never have enough time to finish anything. The truth of the matter is that all you need is to learn to better manage your time and you’ll see that you have better control of your life and of what you do on a day-to-day basis. Suddenly, you’ll learn to juggle those 3 big things in your life like a pro.