10 Time Management Skills You Must Have To Make The Best Out Of 2023.
We are only a few weeks into the new year, and many goals and plans are already losing their footing because of poor time management skills. To get the most out of 2023, you must make a conscious plan to manage your time and priorities. Only then would you accomplish and achieve your set goals and objectives.
The following are 10 effective time management skills you must have:
Prioritize your tasks:
Prioritizing your tasks is one of the time management skills you shouldn’t joke with. It’s like the backbone of every skill I will explain here. If you can understand how to prioritize your tasks, you’ll be able to manage your time effectively.
There are many ways to prioritize your tasks… You can choose the “eat-the-frog” method. That is, tackling the big tasks first and then going after the small ones later. But if you really want to be productive, I’ll recommend Eisenhower’s technique.
There are four columns in this technique, namely:
i. Urgent and Important: Most important tasks fall into this category when you don’t mark them off your bucket list while they are still unurgent. Examples are assignments, projects, etc.
Since they are already urgent, you have to do them right away to avoid consequences you wouldn’t like to get.
ii. Urgent and Not Important: This is usually someone else’s task. Since it’s not important to achieve your set goals, you need to check the necessity. You can either outsource it to someone else or decline the task.
iii. Not Urgent and Important: This blog post you are reading happens to fall under this task. Some good examples are keeping yourself healthy, spending quality time with your family, etc.
You can have important tasks that are not urgent. They will only become urgent if you don’t do them on time. So, to avoid this, you should add it to your calendar or to-do list and get the task done on time.
iv. Not important and not urgent: This is more or less a time waster. You should avoid it at all costs. For example, scrolling mindlessly on social media, searching without any purpose on the web, engaging in conversations that have no head or tail, etc.
Using the Eisenhower technique, you can divide and assign activities to their rightful places.
Delegate:
To make the most of your time, you should learn to delegate your tasks to other people who are specialists in that field.
For example, an entrepreneur who runs an online business can decide to focus on creating marketing content and copy while outsourcing Facebook ads, landing page setup, graphic design, and virtual tasks to other people. This is to help him focus on his strengths and bring in more sales for his business.
- To-do lists:
This is one of the habits of highly successful people. As a good time manager, you should have a to-do list and, preferably, use the prioritization technique you learned earlier. You can either set your to-do list at night (before the next day) or early in the morning. This serves as a guide for you during the day. This simple time management skill will save you from a lot of confusion.
- Set up a deadline:
What are projects without deadlines?
If you want to achieve your goals faster, then you should create deadlines. And commit them to memory by putting a reminder around your workspace.
Sometimes, deadlines can stretch you, but they are also for your good. If it’s your personal project, don’t beat yourself up when you don’t meet your deadlines. You can always create a new one. But if it’s an official task, you can politely ask for a deadline extension.
- Overcome procrastination with the Pomodoro technique:
Another time management skill you must observe is the Pomodoro technique.
The Pomodoro technique is simply a technique where you work for 25 minutes and rest for 5 minutes. The 5 minutes of rest won’t break your workflow, but it will give your brain enough rest to continue your task.
Knowing that you can rest every 5 minutes will trick your brain into getting started with the task. After all, you have a flexible work routine.
- Avoid multitasking:
It’s no longer news that your brain can’t multitask. Instead, it goes back and forth between tasks. It’s just like the “minimize” feature on your phone. But unlike that feature, it doesn’t work in the background.
To avoid burning out, you should put your full attention on one task at a time, so you can complete it in a reasonable amount of time and then move on to the next.
- Wake up early:
You can increase your productivity and manage your time effectively if you wake up early in the morning.
For example, some gurus say you should wake up by 5 a.m. Now, between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m., you would have achieved a lot compared to people who start their day (work) at 9 a.m.
If you find it hard to wake up by 5 a.m., you can try to wake up 30 minutes earlier than your usual time. After 1 week, you can increase it to 1 hour. And then keep moving like that.
9. The ability to say “no”:
This simple yet important time management skill will save you from a lot of unnecessary trouble and stress. Saying “no” to tasks that aren’t adding any value to you and are a total waste of your time should be on your priority list.
Although you can go the extra mile for some people, you should learn to say no without feeling guilty.
- Automating tasks:
Automating your tasks is one of the time management skills you must learn. Life would have been much harder without automation.
Learn to use automation to your advantage.
For example, if you create content for social media, you can use automation tools like Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Buffer, and Social Pilot to manage your social media accounts, schedule posts, check analytics, and create custom-branded URLs, to name a few.
Most of these time management skills are simple to learn and can be mastered with consistent practice. You should try them out and maximize your 2023 to the fullest.
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