Time Management - Top Tips

Today I wanted to talk about time management. Why? Because I think this is one of the most significant flaws in 99% of the population. Our lives today are crazy, we pass the day running, and when we reached the end of the day, we always feel we didn't manage to do everything that we wanted. We all start the days running and even before leaving home we are already late for something. So this is why I wanted to write these tips to help you all improve your time management and help you all have more time for yourself.

I used these tips every day in my life, and since I started following them, I noticed a massive improvement in my time management. So let's start:

• How do you spend your time currently?

  • Before talking about the solution, we need to understand where the problem lies. So we need to look to our last week and try to analyze how you spent your time and look for moments that you would call WASTE TIME. You need to keep in mind that if you want to have more time, you need to skip some things since time is limited and you can't change it. By doing this exercise, you will for sure find immediately wasted time on social media. This is today the number 1 problem on time management. These apps were designed for you never to finish scrolling, and they keep feeding you with more and more content. But for sure, you will find other things in your day that you consider waste or at least with less priority that you can cut or reduce.

• To-Do Lists

  • Now we will start to make lists of the things we have to do and want to do. Remember, we are not giving priority levels yet, just making a list of things that we want to do and have to. In this list, you should include everything, big or small, and even emails, meetings, or a phone call you have to do to schedule a doctor appointment for your kid. Yes, everything because every task takes time, and remember time is a very precious asset that is limited in a day.

• Prioritize

  • This is the crucial moment for success. When you finished making your list, you need to start to prioritize. And here I would complicate things, and I would create 3 Lists, "MUST", "SHOULD," and "COULD." Let's see each one of them:

    • MUST - This is the list of all things that are important and urgent.

    • SHOULD - This is the list of the things that are important but not urgent

    • COULD - This is the list of things that are not important and not urgent.

In the beginning, it won't be obvious to divide all the tasks. For sure all will be important and urgent or the opposite. But with time and practice, you will start to identify them clearly, and you will see that you will begin to reduce the number of essential tasks on your list because you began to be more productive.

• Add to your schedule.

  • Congratulations, you have your lists ready, but now it comes to the final touch to your lists, defining time for each task. Like I said several times, time is limited, so be wise and make sure you schedule the right amount of time for each task. I would say that you should leave a margin to avoid overlapping charges or do them running. This is something that you will not master at the beginning, and you will have to continue to adapt and improve for the following weeks. We all created To-do Items and defining 20min, and then it took us 40min. With practice, you will get better, and you will be more precise. We usually tend to overestimate time for small tasks and underestimate for more significant tasks. This is so normal. When we plan, we have afraid of failure, so we miscalculate time. Another thing important when defining your lists is understanding your energy levels throughout the day and putting the most difficult tasks when we have more energy and the easy when we know we have less motivation or focus or energy. But also very important don't forget to include pauses during the day and between tasks, like this, you can have a moment to check your phone, social media, get a coffee, and look out through the window and relax.

• Limit Email Time

  • Nowadays, email just became too much. Have you noticed that we receive emails for everything and that companies are starting to abandon the rule of everything has to be sent by email? I currently receive more than 200 emails a day. Many of them I'm just in cc, but still, I have to read, and some I don't. But since you only know when you read them, you already lost a massive amount of time. And since I receive so many, If I would be looking at my emails every time I would receive one, I wouldn't do anything else during the day. So I created a rule for my email moments, and I made 3 Labels in my email to help me organize them.

    • Follow up - All emails that I need to react asap.

    • Read through - Important emails but that I can read later. Typically, emails containing info that I need to be aware but I don't need to do anything about it or react.

    • Waiting - Emails that I'm waiting for someone to react, but I will need to take care after.

Every hour, I look at my email, and I categorize it until my inbox is zero and then move along to my next task in my to-do list.

Sure, if one email is urgent or quick to answer, I do it right away and take it out of my mind. 

Well, these were my 5 tips on how to do time management, and I hope this will work for you as it does for me.

Lots of Love