How to manage your time effectively

Are you constantly struggling to complete your work within stipulated time, but failing to do it, resulting in late sitting or working extra hours every day? Then it’s worth stepping back and taking a different approach of doing your work.

Try to identify the reasons first

• Do you plan your work a week or a month back or do you do it every day.

• Do you prioritize your work or just do it the way it was assigned to you.

• Are you bad at saying no to your friends and colleagues for the unplanned support or help required by them?

• Are you occupied with a lot of small tasks, which are eating a large amount of your productive time on a regular basis?

• Are you more than 100% occupied?

• Are there any weak areas where in you are taking more time than the expected time?

• Are you poor at planning and estimating your work?

Make a list of above questions and see if there is any room for improvement. If you prioritize and plan your work a week or a month ahead, then half of your problem is solved. For the rest of it you require to learn the project management and time management skills.

Use time management skills

It's important that you develop effective strategies for managing your time to balance the conflicting demands of time for critical projects, team performance review, team support, self-grooming and many necessary and unnecessary meetings. Time management skills are valuable in managing a project and in many other aspects of life: from managing your day to managing your vacation.Sometimes it may seem that there isn't enough time to do everything that you need to.When the due date is very near you have to combine the pressures of intensive work with right set of resources, good management of your time can be particularly important. Once you have identified ways in which you can improve the management of your time, you can begin to adjust your routines and patterns of behavior to reduce any time-related stress in your life.

Try the below listed tips

• What’s most important today?

List down top 3 most important task of the day, then plan your day accordingly.

• Avoid switching from one task to other

Every individual gets interrupted with a phone call or an email, or particularly an instant message, it distracts him/her from his current task. The time it takes to get re-focused on what he/she was doing is lost, useful time is wasted. So try to make an effort to eliminate those distractions. When you remove the things that create the distractions, the distractions don’t happen nearly as much.

• Focus on one thing at a time

As much as possible, try to focus on one thing at a time and be fully present. Fully engaged in your current work only. Don’t try to do 2-3 tasks together as multi-tasking is not everyone’s cup of tea.

• Better use of your mail box

Spend some time in managing your email and mail folders. Having an empty inbox relieves the work pressure by a great extent.

• Make appointments with yourself

This may sound crazy but if you spend few minutes to review your own goal sheets, it helps you to work in a better and planned way. Scheduling appointments with yourself really works, if it’s in the calendar it becomes more real to you, and you are bound to do it.

• Delegate some of your work

This one has been one of the toughest thing but extremely helpful. People with the perception that no one do that work better and try to do everything them self only. This leads to a lot of trouble and even if it were true, that doesn’t mean you do it yourself as excess work impacts the quality of work.So start delegating some work to your team members.

Some of these skills including setting clear goals, breaking your goals down into discreet steps, prioritizing - focusing on urgent and important tasks rather than those that are not important,making list to remind you of what you need to do when, and organizing your work schedule. (Whizlabs)