Time is a precious resource, and mastering time management is the difference between being busy and being productive. To help you achieve more in a given period of time, here are 10 effective strategies that you can easily implement. Start by understanding how you spend your time. Everyone gets the same amount of hours in a day, so it's essential to use effective time management strategies.
When you set out to achieve something, work backwards by first thinking about the result you want to achieve. Be specific and define your goal in terms of something concrete that you can measure. The RPM system works with other effective time management strategies, such as results coaching. An outcome coach can help you set specific, measurable goals that align with your unique “personal and professional needs”.
Take control and make a plan to manage your life, not just your time. Time-blocking emails is an effective way to deal with necessary communication while recovering some of those hours. Schedule a one-on-one meeting with your manager and let him know which of your current tasks you love and that you would like to do more, and what responsibilities exhaust you and that, instead, you would set aside in the coming months. If possible, keep your Monday meetings off and focus on finishing the most important tasks before you run out of work.
Consider organizing a daily status meeting for your team to share priorities, ask teams to register asynchronously online, or centralize task management with a project manager. The golden hour is the block of time, often two to three hours, in which you do your best work. Joining tasks is when you combine two things that you can do at the same time without sacrificing the quality of either of them. Eisenhower invented the Eisenhower Matrix (also sometimes known as the Urgently Important Matrix).
Group tasks under a heading such as “Fitness” if necessary. Blocking email time means that instead of constantly checking your email account (or receiving a lot of notifications), you only check it during specific periods of the day. These proven and highly effective time management strategies can help you live a fuller life, because they are more than techniques for managing time: they are tools for transforming the way you think.
