Need More Than 24 Hours A Day? (Time Management Tricks)
You probably asked yourself once: why there is only 24 hours a day? It’s not enough!
If these thoughts sound familiar to you, then you are one of the millions trying to find a way to fit their tasks during the day and always rushing and don’t have enough time to sit and relax.
The good news is in this article, your fantasy of having more than 24 hours a day has been considered. But for the sake of clarity there is no time traveling in these ways. Instead, the best time management tricks that will make you one of the most productive living humans on earth.
Table of Contents
10 Time management tricks
Time Management Trick #1 To-Do List
First thing you need to make a simple list of the main tasks you want to achieve in your day. You need to make it simple because making a complex one can be overwhelming most of the times which unfortunately leads to procrastination.
This will keep you focused on the major things you need to finish before letting distractions come along your way.
How to Make To-Do list?
- Add tasks as soon as it comes to your mind: Same thing that you do with your ideas to need to write it down before you forget it.
- Limit your list to 5 Tasks daily: Having less tasks to do throughout the day will help you be more focused on your goals.
- Set smaller goals for every task: another way to be more efficient, while the whole focus is on your task.
- Group similar tasks together: This can save you valuable time of switching between different tasks, and it also help you to stay concentrated.
Time Management Trick #2 Stop Multitasking
You might think that multitasking will save you a lot of time at the end of the day. In fact, researchers found that multitasking can affect your productivity negatively and reduce it by 40%.
Switching breaks your concentration and makes you feel tired, because it requires more energy for your brain to handle it.
What to do instead?
- Prioritize the most important tasks: Do most important things first help you finish your task more quickly.
- Focus on the task in hand: Concentration on every task makes you become time efficient.
Time Management Trick #3 Set Time Limit
Another useful trick is setting a limited time for each task. This will prevent you from procrastinating and getting distracted. Make sure you give a reasonable time for yourself; you don’t want to feel like you failed finishing your task on time.
Time Management Trick #4 Plan Ahead
It’s hard to begin your day properly when you wake up without the right aim on your goals.
You will be more focused during the day if you plan ahead.
When to set up my plan?
- The night before: before going to bed always use last 15 minutes to write your tomorrow’s plan.
- First thing in the Morning: Before starting your day, take your time to write a well-organized plan.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
Abraham Lincoln
Time Management Trick #5 Do MITs in the Morning
There are two important reasons why you have to do MITs (aka Most Important Tasks) first in the morning. because you have a limited amount of will power and the greatest amount is during the morning additionally, you have limited amount of energy so play it smart!
The second reason is that After completing your big task, the reward from your accomplishment will be another source of power that last with you till the end of the day.
Time Management Trick #6 Perfect is Slow
Perfectionists usually don’t realize that they’re going through a big time-consuming trap, simply because nothing will be good enough for them, so they keep going back and forth to same tasks.
Instead, Do Your best and forget the rest.
How to stop being a perfectionist:
- Identify standard needed: identify standards needed for the task in hand.
- Give your self a reason to move on: Setting a timer to finish your task can be very useful.
- Do experiments: In order to find things that works for you and do it more often. Eventually you replace “perfect” with “Good Enough”.
Time Management Trick #7 Learn to say No
When you set up your plan and have set your tasks, you need to stop bringing your self extra time-consuming things, instead you can ask your friends to give you some help, that will surely save you valuable time.
Time Management Trick #8 Eliminate Distractions
Distractions negatively affect your concentration and reduce your productivity. Researchers found that it takes 23 minutes to concentrate on a task again if you got interrupted.
How to eliminate distractions:
- Turn off your phone notifications
- Turn off Wi-Fi when you don’t need it
- Check your email inbox once a day
- Set limited time for social media
Time Management Trick #9 Apply 80/20 Rule
Also called Pareto Principle. To apply this rule, you need to focus on 20% part of your activities that will makes you 80% of the results. For example, 20 percent of your emails should lead you to 80 percent of your important meetings.
You can use this rule to rethink your to-do list, and arrange your tasks by its 80% result factor.
Time Management Trick #10 Automate Tasks
This trick can be super helpful when it’s applied. Instead of doing particular task over and over again, automating them will save you much of valuable time. One of the smartest ways to be efficient is putting your work on autopilot.
Some of daily tasks to automate:
- Creating presentations using mindmeister
- Email-Free Communication Using Slack
- Posting on Social Media Using Buffer, or Hootsuite
- Automatic computer Backups
- Planning Trips using Tripit
- Proofreading of documents using Grammarly
- Filling online Forms using Roboform
Bonus Tip
Nothing is better than having a good rest after a long and productive day. But what’s more important is giving yourself time to stop and reflect. Don’t forget to take breaks between your tasks as you need sometime to gain same amount of focus on the next task.
