Effective Time Management: A Practical Guide
by Sorin Dumitrascu
Before you can improve your use of time, you need to know how much time you have – typically eight hours in a workday – and how you currently use this time. Keeping a time log for a week and using it to record how long it takes you to complete each of the activities you perform can help you to do this.
You should categorize activities and assign them priority levels so that you can create a summary of how you allocate your time over a typical week. From this summary, you can determine where you are wasting time and then address those areas.
Energy levels fluctuate throughout the day. Knowing how these "peaks" and "valleys" affect your ability to perform certain tasks can help you schedule your tasks in the most effective way.
Generally, energy levels are highest in the morning, so this is a good time to handle difficult or complex tasks that require good short-term memory and high concentration.
In the early afternoon, your energy levels start to drop, so it's best to focus on only moderately demanding tasks. By late afternoon, you have the least energy and should focus on tasks that are the easiest to complete. Afternoons lend themselves to creative tasks, processing information, or drawing on long-term memory.
Energy levels are moderate in the evening, so this is a suitable time for repetitive tasks that require concentration.
The Myers-Briggs test measures your preferences in terms of information gathering, decision making, energy source, and dealing with the outside world to determine your personality type and how you are likely to behave.
These personality traits affect how you manage your time. Each personality type has certain strengths and weaknesses. So knowing more about yourself can help you to determine how to improve your time management skills.
To manage your time and work effectively, you need to start with goals. You need to set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-related. Once goals are set, you break them down into tasks to create a comprehensive to-do list. These tasks should be action-centered, incremental, measurable, and scheduled.
Once you know what tasks you need to perform to achieve your goals, you should prioritize each according to its importance and urgency. To do this, you can use a priority matrix, which categorizes tasks as either urgent and important, urgent but not important, not urgent but important, or not urgent and not important.
To prioritize your workload effectively, you can sequence or queue the tasks you need to perform.
You should categorize activities and assign them priority levels so that you can create a summary of how you allocate your time over a typical week. From this summary, you can determine where you are wasting time and then address those areas.
Energy levels fluctuate throughout the day. Knowing how these "peaks" and "valleys" affect your ability to perform certain tasks can help you schedule your tasks in the most effective way.
Generally, energy levels are highest in the morning, so this is a good time to handle difficult or complex tasks that require good short-term memory and high concentration.
In the early afternoon, your energy levels start to drop, so it's best to focus on only moderately demanding tasks. By late afternoon, you have the least energy and should focus on tasks that are the easiest to complete. Afternoons lend themselves to creative tasks, processing information, or drawing on long-term memory.
Energy levels are moderate in the evening, so this is a suitable time for repetitive tasks that require concentration.
The Myers-Briggs test measures your preferences in terms of information gathering, decision making, energy source, and dealing with the outside world to determine your personality type and how you are likely to behave.
These personality traits affect how you manage your time. Each personality type has certain strengths and weaknesses. So knowing more about yourself can help you to determine how to improve your time management skills.
To manage your time and work effectively, you need to start with goals. You need to set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-related. Once goals are set, you break them down into tasks to create a comprehensive to-do list. These tasks should be action-centered, incremental, measurable, and scheduled.
Once you know what tasks you need to perform to achieve your goals, you should prioritize each according to its importance and urgency. To do this, you can use a priority matrix, which categorizes tasks as either urgent and important, urgent but not important, not urgent but important, or not urgent and not important.
To prioritize your workload effectively, you can sequence or queue the tasks you need to perform.
