Time Management Tips

5 Simple Time Management Skills To Complete Tasks Quickly

Waste Time To Be More Efficient

It seems counterintuitive to state that you could be more efficient by wasting time. But, the truth is, when you allow yourself some flexibility in the process, you have the potential to make efficiency happen.

This is not to say that you can spend six hours out of an eight-hour day wasting your time. You need to keep the ratio skewed to being productive. But, trying to get too much done without having some “you time,” is going to burn you out.

The phrase wasting time is actually a misnomer in this case. What you are doing is setting aside some time to be creative or to get some exercise, etc. It could even be a time that lets you clear your head by taking a walk or sitting in a room by yourself to get away from the grind.

People make proclamations that they are too busy to waste time in the manner specified. But, that could be a huge mistake. When you set aside that time to do something out of the ordinary or spontaneous, you often discover ways to do your main tasks better.

For instance, suppose you went to the gym during your lunch hour, and you took a class. In the class is someone who is involved in the same kind of business you are in but works for a different company.

You both get to talking and become friends. Then, you exchange ideas and in the process discover information that you incorporate into your work.

This exchange may not have happened in your workspace. Sometimes, it takes outside entities to get our creative juices flowing. Therefore it’s always a good idea to look for different ways to accomplish the same tasks or talk to people you wouldn’t normally talk to on a routine basis.

You will need to make sure this time-wasting process if it can be called that, is limited to a small percentage of your day or your to-do list. You still need to get your work done.

But, there is a reason why companies don’t harp onto their employees when they take some time to socialize in the coffee room, etc. Even within different departments, you can expand your knowledge base, and that is good for the company as a whole.

Some people will go overboard with this and end up being late on their deadlines. Avoid this at all costs. Set goals for the day that give you a certain amount of time for yourself after completing a large portion of your daily routine.

Can Being More Efficient Lower Stress?

When you learn how to be more efficient, you get more work done, and you tend to do it better, all things being equal. This makes your boss happy which means you won’t get in trouble for not getting your work complete. You may be given more responsibilities as a result, but as long as you maintain your efficiency, you should be able to add those to your workload.

Efficiency also means getting others to help you out. As you prove your effectiveness and your responsibilities increase, you should be able to get support for having others pitch in.

When you get support from your boss, it will be more difficult for your colleagues to resist your authority. Besides, when you show them how to be more efficient, it will get them on board. They will likely ask others for help when that happens.

This increase in efficiency is going to mean more work gets done, but it will take less time. You will constantly look for ways to do things better, whether it be via automation, or use delegation, etc.

Since you are getting more done with less, your stress levels will decrease, and you will be happier at work.

There will be some managers who don’t see the forest for the trees and the more work you get done, the more they see it as an opportunity to increase your workload.

This can get to the point of adding to your stress levels if they don’t support you. For instance, if they discourage you from delegating these new responsibilities, or they don’t give you the tools you need, this will overwhelm you and add to your stress. If talking it out with your manager won’t help, it may be time to look elsewhere.

The good news is your increased skills in being efficient will help you land a new job quicker.

When you learn how to be more efficient, you have greater control of your workload. Most people find they actually free up time when this happens due to economies of scale.

This free time gives you breathing room, and you won’t be so flustered all the time. You won’t be scrambling to get your work done by the deadlines.

Efficient people tend to have more opportunities available to them, in their current employment situations as well as outside the organization. They will always be in more demand. The great part about this is it won’t add to their stress levels.

How To Make Your Workouts More Efficient

One of the reasons people hate going to the gym is because they have to spend hours there to get any benefits. But, there are ways to make your workouts more efficient, which means you won’t have to spend as much time at the gym.

Do some of your exercises at home. If you have some dumbbells lying around, keep them in your family room or whatever room you spend most of your time. While watching television, stand up and use the dumbbells for one set. Do this on commercial breaks.

You can also do a set of sit-ups while watching television or whatever you do in your spare time. If you can get several sets in while you are home, you will have less to do at the gym. By staggering these exercises, you will be more inclined to do them.

Consider using the services of a personal trainer. These people go through a certification which means they learn the best exercises to do in the shortest time possible.

They will also show you how to do them right and correct you when you are not. The downside to this is they tend to be expensive and require you to work with them on a weekly basis.

You should also consider working out with a friend. It’s much easier to keep after each other than it is to try to motivate yourself. A friend may also help to motivate you into going to the gym when you start losing that drive.

It’s probably a good idea to keep the number of people you work with small. The larger a group is, the more they become distracted with talking too much, etc. This can still happen when you work with one person. If it does, you can try to choose someone else as your workout partner.

Another way to make your workouts more efficient is to come up with an actual plan for your workout. You could choose to hire a personal trainer just to come up with your plan and then do the workouts on your own.

But, there is also plenty of information on the internet that can help you structure your own plan. Try out different plans you may find and write them down. Make sure you are consistent in working your plan and have a way to measure your success.

Make sure that you factor in your diet when you are working out. Many people believe they can eat whatever they want since they are working out. This is false, and you will not get as much out of your workout when you do this.

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Master Time Management Techniques To Help Maintain Focus

Time and stress are always closely tied together. Most of your stress will likely come from you being worried about not finishing your work on time, and that same stress will likely delay you even further, which ends up becoming a vicious cycle that leaves you stressed out and without much work done.

It can be frustrating for you, your co-workers, and your clients. To avoid all of this, you need to master some proper time management skills in order to give yourself enough time to get your projects done easily, and to avoid a scenario in which you’re overly stressed out.

When you’re stressed out because you don’t feel like you have enough time to complete a project, the logical thing to do would be to get to work. However, that rarely ends up being the case.

Chances are, if you’re stressed out about work, you’ll find ways to distract yourself so that you feel better in the mere short term, while in the long term you’re going to be making things much worse for yourself.

There are all kinds of excuses that you’ll see yourself come up with. You might claim that you’re distracting yourself to be more creative for a bit or to get yourself feeling better so that you can then work more efficiently.

Even if that’s true, chances are high that you’re going to be spending more time than you’re saving, leading to you having even less time to actually complete your project. With time management skills, you can avoid this situation altogether, because it’s difficult to get out of once you’re in it.

Plan

First, you can carefully plan out your project’s schedule and how long it’s going to take you to do it. Don’t cut corners at this stage – you need to be completely honest. If you claim that a part of your work will only take 30 minutes, because that’s the fastest you can do it, don’t count on that.

If there’s a chance it’ll take you two hours, budget for that to take you two hours. If you end up taking less time, that’s great. However, if you do take up that much time, you’ll have already accounted for it, so you won’t be playing catch-up.

You need to also cut out any time distractions to see how much of your time is being spent on things that aren’t work. You’d be surprised how quickly time can fly when you’re watching shows online or scrolling through social media. That time could be better spent getting ahead in your work or catching up if that’s what you need to do.

And it’s not just time distractions that you need to be aware of! There are so many things that will try to divide your attention and stop you from staying focused and being creative.

It takes a lot of discipline to try to ignore these distractions, but you do need to try to set boundaries. The question is “How?”

Set Strong Boundaries For Dealing With Interruptions

No matter how hard you may try to avoid it, you’re going to be put in situations where you’re working and getting constantly interrupted. It can happen in many places, whether it be at work with other co-workers, somewhere with friends, or at home with your family.

It can be frustrating, or it can take you off track, so you need to learn how to deal with these interruptions properly so that you keep up with your work while also being civil with others.

For example, let’s say that you’re working at home writing up some documents on your laptop. Your kids might come in and start talking to you or make loud noises in the background again and again.

What you shouldn’t do is get mad at them, but rather you should tell them to be quiet during certain times of the day or interact with them every so often so that they’re less prone to interrupting you later on.

The situation with your family can depend on age as well. Toddlers won’t understand very easily that you need to focus on work, so try and patiently work with them to not come in so often, or try and play with them a bit more when you can so that they feel like they’re seeing you enough.

With older kids they can be a bit more understanding, so you should be able to explain it to them, and with teens they probably want to be in their own rooms anyway. When it comes to coworkers, you don’t want to seem like a complete stick in the mud, but you also have to be able to focus on the work you’re there to do.

Ask them nicely to talk later when you’re not working, and if that doesn’t work, get a little sterner. They of all people should hopefully understand that you need work, and if they’re still preventing you from doing your work, you might have to take the problem to someone above you instead of dealing with it personally.

Finally, you have friends that can be distracting. They might badger you into going out and hanging out with them, or prod you about working too much, but you should be able to tell them that you have to work, and you’ll just have to organize some time to hang out later.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but you should be able to still enjoy the time you have with your friends and family without sacrificing your work.

As you can appreciate, all of this can take a lot of self-discipline and a positive attitude. If you don’t have this, you will probably struggle to manage your time and distractions, so it is well worth your while to adopt the correct mindset; I know this may sound a little cliched but it does really work.

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Time Management: 3 Steps To Multiply Time And Profits

When you hear the word entrepreneur, your first thought might be Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Daymond John or Susie Ma. These are high level entrepreneurs that saw opportunities to solve problems and make a lot of money. They built capital, created products and services, that are unique and became very wealthy.

The ideas in this article are some of the ways high level entrepreneurs succeed. Have no doubts that if you are a new entrepreneur or even a solo business owner-putting these seven time management ideas to work…will advance your business to new levels.

Some of the ideas can be incorporated immediately, while the others, such as the ones with software or apps…will require a bit of research and decision making.

Set Your Business Goals

Are you 100% clear on what your business goals are? You need to get your new business off to a flying start. Or if you have been in business for awhile and there have been issues, it may be due to not seeing things, crystal clear.

Consider having a self-improvement goal as part of your business goals. Self-improvement will strengthen the other areas of your goal setting. Get a mentor or a coach who has the experience in the areas of self-confidence, self-esteem or creating a new mindset around achieving success in business.

You need to set income goals and keep track of everything. The most basic thing is having monthly, quarterly and annual income goals. If you want to be a high functioning, successful entrepreneur, think about tracking everything daily in a special spreadsheet. You could have a daily income goal and keep track of every dollar that comes in and what you spend on your business daily.

Stop your internal negative dialogue. When you have lofty business goals, sometimes you end up talking yourself out of something that if you stuck to it…would be ultimately successful.

Hannibal saw the mountains and basically said, “we will either find a way or make one. Leading thousands of soldiers and elephants over a mountain range, Hannibal had an extremely positive mental image of himself.

Have a great idea for something that will make you $10K a month? If you start to balk, just take the first few actions and as you see success, put your foot on the accelerator and get up to speed.

Internal negative dialogue or “stinky thinking” as it is also called, destroys dreams and ambition. You can overcome that and build an awesome business.

Define The Tasks That Will Help You Achieve Those Goals

When you have a business idea and want to either start it or add it to your existing business…you need to define your tasks. This is where you put on your strategic thinking hat and write out the who, what, where of what the tasks are. Questions to ask are things like:

Who will help you? Do you have a team already that has the skills to get the new business up and running, then turn it into profit?
What exactly is the business? Make a business plan. Add mind maps.
Where will you conduct this business. Decide if you have enough space. Do you need to upgrade?
How long will it take to get this business off the ground?

When you are a solo venture, the tasks will be slightly different. Let’s look at the example of someone who runs a social media business for a medium size start-up.

Some of the tasks for this person to reach their goals might be:

Getting traffic to their website, to gain new clients.
Getting new testimonials constantly to show they are on top of their game.
Studying and trying new methods to gain followers for their customers.
Learning the best of copywriting to create awesome Twitter/Tumbler/Facebook posts for their customers.
Creating lists for different tasks and tracking everything from sales, expenses, cold calls for new business and new supplies for the home office.

Writing out the tasks and adding time to complete dates will help save time and achieve your goals.

Plan

There should be an action plan with clear time frames, deadlines and who should complete those tasks. Use project management tools as Asana, Basecamp or Trello.

Everyone needs a plan. And the entrepreneur always creates the best plan, while putting together an amazing team. It is a case of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the team members.

With that knowledge, you can decide the best person for a task, set the deadlines, the goals and of course the rewards. With technology today, project management tools help the entrepreneur keep everything on track. Let’s look at three outstanding tools now.

A) Asana allows you to assign projects and then see on the righthand side of the app, who has the project and what stage they are currently in, such as just started or completed. You can chart your course for smooth sailing through the entire project. In Asana, there is a feature called, “Timeline,” where you can see the flow of work and where it is being passed to the next team member for their actions. There are over 100 items you can integrate into Asana, such as emails and all pertinent files.

B) Basecamp works in the same way and has features to remind people when a task is overdue. One thing that bogs any business down, is endless meetings. With Basecamp, it eliminates the need for time wasting meetings as everyone on the team can log-in and see where the project is at.

Basecamp states that 59% of meetings have been cut out by its users. Basecamp is simple to use and there is no steep learning curve, so anyone can jump right in. Basecamp is great for multiple projects, since you can pull them up all onto one screen and see the status.

All conversations on inline and this elimates that annoying re: factor you get in traditional emails. Cut down on the number of apps you normally used in projects, because in Basecamp, all notifications are in one spot.

C) Trello works on a board system, where all aspects on your projects are listed on individual cards that you can glance at. You can view a card like, “research,” and jump in with a comment or attach a file that will assist in the research end of the project. If your team is already using apps, you can incorporate those right into the Trello card to maximize productivity.

Check out the apps that you feel will power your business by clicking the link below:

https://asana.com/

https://basecamp.com/

https://trello.com/

OK, there are 3 steps you can use to multiply time and profits. However, there are 4 more and if you want to get all 7 in a handy report, then click on the featured resource below to download a free report that you can read at your leisure 🙂