You may have the latest tools to help you with difficult tasks, but it’s still important to make the most of the time that you have each day. Whether you are studying for the Bar or working on your small business, every day presents a challenge in time management.
You may often find yourself wanting to accomplish more before the day ends. However, doing so is difficult to pull off. The good news is that it’s possible to achieve anything within a limited timeframe. You just need to adopt certain habits and techniques. Here are a few of them that will definitely help you maximize your time for the most important things in life and your career.
1. Commit to a daily goal
What do you want to achieve each day? It matters a lot to list down your priorities. Whether it’s writing reports or giving your home a deep cleaning, it’s important to list down specific goals that recur daily. These goals should include minor tasks and tasks that comprise a major goal. For instance, if you are a business owner, your minor tasks should include making phone calls to potential customers or posting on your official Facebook page. If you have a long-term goal such as writing an ebook for Kindle, you can allocate certain hours of each day to work on it little by little.
Identifying your daily goals keeps you from overlooking minor yet essential tasks and helps you finish a complicated project in chunks. By deciding the number of hours you can commit to these tasks, you can allocate the rest of your time for other important or urgent matters.
2. Learn to say “No”
Many of us have the tendency to accept favors. While it never hurts to help someone out, giving too much of your time won’t do you any good. This doesn’t necessarily mean that being helpful is bad, but you still need to be mindful of your own time. There will be cases when you have to say “no” to a request or favor, especially when you have other priorities lined up and you wouldn’t want to stretch yourself too thin.
There are ways you can do this without sounding off-putting. For one, you can say that you’d be glad to help out but you have other things to work on. You can also ask the other person if they can find someone else to assist them. It may take some practice if you are the type of person who says “yes” to everything, but learning to refuse helps you focus on what matters the most.
3. Get someone to assist
Being able to do a variety of tasks simultaneously has become a life skill. Compared to life 20 years ago, technology has made it possible for us to achieve our goals, but not everything can be delegated to apps and automated programs.
Creative and technical work is better handled by professionals, so you may wish to hire an assistant to help you lighten the load. If writing a self-help ebook is one of your goals for this year, you might want to hire a freelance writer to help you write an initial draft. When it comes to managing the financials of your startup, ask yourself if there’s a financial adviser or accountant near me who can help make sense of these numbers?
There is no harm in recruiting a professional to help you with repetitive and complicated activities. You just have to look for the right people through platforms like UpWork or Fiverr. Once you have hired an experienced professional, you will have more time for doing other important work.
4. Pace yourself
Accomplishing your daily goals isn’t a race. While you want to get as much work done, it doesn’t help if you exert yourself excessively. The desire to make the most of your time will only lead to stress, burnout and fatigue.
There is no magic pill to achieving more in such a limited amount of time, but there are ways that allow you to game the system without draining yourself. For one, you can use the Pomodoro method. This involves working in intervals with a few moments of rest in between. Use this method to work intensely for 30 minutes, have a quick five-minute, and start another 30-minute cycle. You can also divide your tasks into milestones so it will be easier for you to manage without having to stress yourself out. Pacing yourself helps you reserve time and energy for the things that might come up unexpectedly.
The bottom line here is that you are in control of your time and energy. You just have to learn how to spend them wisely so you can achieve your goals without much hassle.