Time Management is something that can help us prioritize/organize our work load. It is somehow hard to practice, but with patience and time investment, it can become a great quality for our daily life.
In order to develop good time management, we must take into consideration some factors such as: the quality spent to complete the work, the time spent to that particular task and the involvement of other people in the task.
There are some strategies that can help us achieve this:
• Establish key tasks that must be completed before the end of the day.
These “key tasks” must be in accordance to the hours spent at work. It is not the same trying to complete a report that can be easily done in 2-4 hours, than adding for example, completing one that we know it is not going to be done in one full day. So, here we are talking about realistic “key tasks” and trying to complete them.
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• Assign timing to these key tasks.
It is important to provide an estimate of the time involvement to complete certain tasks. This can help us measure the time involvement we might need to invest on the task and consider if it can be done or not. If we estimate, and we see that we will not approach our goal, then it is time to give a realistic re-estimation of the time involved and switch to another task that could take less time to be completed.
• Never start to work on something if there is not enough information or it isn't ready.
There are sometimes in which we want to try to do things, but these are not in our queue yet or we need to dig more to find information. This is usually time consuming since nothing will be completed from our side. Try to determine what are the things you will need before starting and start working on it until it is on your side. In this way, you will complete it in less time and with the best quality you can.
• Do not allow interruptions during key tasks.
If there are key tasks that you are working on, any interruption can cause a lack of concentration. So, whenever you are working on anything considered as a key task, try to focus on it and avoid distractions such as: standing up, checking your cellphone, chatting, etc. If you try to concentrate and work on your key tasks, these could be done in a less amount of time.
• Absolute concentration in the task you are working on.
It is quite normal that whenever we have a huge workload, we tend to try to do multitasking. But this is not always the best approach, since we tend to move from one activity to another without actually providing results to oneñ productivity tends to be less and this becomes time consuming. It is better to focus on one task at a time, with the max concentration. If you can't move on, then you could switch to another task, but leaving the first one at hold as long as you are always giving your 100%.
As you can see, these strategies are not so hard to achieve. The idea is to try to do them in parallel and always thinking that you will have better results if you think positive. In the end, the objective is the same: Learn on the best ways to become a more organized person and try to manage your time efficiently to improve your daily life.