Time Management: Tools, Tips & Techniques

Time Management Tools, Tips & Techniques

Being disorganized and unfocused creates unnecessary stress, creates an in-balance in body/mind and leads to lesser success levels.

In this year of the Ox when we’re all super busy and hard working, I want to share a very practical time management tool to help you work hard on the right things. This time management tool here offers you a technique to maximize the benefits of what you do with your time, and to overall be more focused and organized, and thus to be more successful, while being calm and in balance.

Time management involves a range of skills, tools, and techniques that you can apply to reach your goals and complete your task or projects.

One of the best time management planning tips I can give you is to have a clear mission and matching clear goals of what you want to achieve. Once you have your big picture in place of guiding principles and goals, the following time management tool is very handy.

Time Management Techniques: The Urgency versus Importance Matrix

This is how you use this time management tool:

Step 1. You list all your projects and tasks that are in your mind, on your plate, and that have come into your in-box. If you are a pro, you can use the tasks in your project management software for this. Of course, this embraces all activities that support realizing your explicit mission and goals.

Step 2. Give each project/task an urgency score, from 1 to 5 with 1 being non-urgent and 5 being most urgent.

Step 3. Give each task on your list an importance score, from 1 (unimportant) to 5 (most important)

Step 4. Plot your most important tasks and most urgent tasks on your chart. Now you have a visual overview of what you should focus your attention to. Let importance be more critical than urgency, although you should probably do all these activities.

Step 5. Place this time/urgency matrix in a highly visible place, so you can keep an eye on where you are going at all times.

Step 6. Make another chart, now completely mapping all activities on your list. Simply do not do any of the tasks that are unimportant and not urgent. Those tasks are time wasters of no concern.

Step 7. Tasks that are medium importance but urgent, you may wish to delegate.

For maximum effectiveness of your time, ONLY do what is important.

Time Management Tip 1: Revisit

The way it is written here it sounds like a one-time only exercise. However, it is a bit of a re-iterative process as it may take time to clarify goals, and decide on what is really most important. Secondly, what is most important to you may shift over time. It’s best to do work with this time management tool on a frequent basis, whereby you can adjust it from time to time.

Time Management Tip 2: Quick Wins

When you are focused on important and urgent tasks, I encourage you to look for ‘quick wins’ in that quadrant. Those are not necessarily more important than other tasks, but those are tasks that can be accomplished quickly, so that you can erase them out of your quadrant, and gives you a visual lighter load to carry. This sense of accomplishment is a good boost of energy that you can use to accomplish further tasks.

Feedback

Let us know please how you are using this time management tool, and how it is affecting your productivity, as well as your calm and peace.