Individual time management skills are not complex or hard to implement on their own, but combining all of the necessary ones together is what will really boost your productivity, and this is not as easy to do. But without the right combination of time management tools and techniques, you may end up saving time in one area only to waste that time on something else.
Here are the top skills that anyone struggling with their time can learn, and combine together to greatly boost their productivity:
- Awareness of Time
- Set Priorities
- Learn How to Say No
- Workflow Your Day
The first step towards doing a good job of managing your time is actually being aware of time passing. As strange as it may sound to call this a skill, it is vital to be consciously aware of the minutes and hours ticking by. Otherwise, despite your best intentions, you can easily become distracted and lose large chunks of the day.
Unless you know what your top priority is, how can you possibly know what you should be working on? Even if you are able to use other techniques to free up hours each day, unless you fill those hours with your highest priority items, you have not accomplished anything. Priority comes down to two main factors: importance and urgency. Tasks that are both important and urgent are at the top of your priority list, while tasks that are important but not urgent come next. Everything else (not important but urgent, and not important and not urgent) may not even need doing, and if they do, they go to the bottom of the list.
If you say yes to every request you get, your time will quickly be completely filled by many things that are not your own set priorities. We covered this in a previous article.
A major issue standing in the way of productivity for many people is a very unproductive daily structure. Unfortunately, personal information managers on the market today don’t give you much help in this area–while they give you views into your email, calendar and tasks, they leave it completely up to you how to divide your time between these modules. Typically, this means too much time spent in your inbox and not enough time in your tasks. Until better automated tools are available to guide you in the right direction, you will need to do this manually: use will power to stop looking at your inbox, except at scheduled intervals, and spend the rest of your time towards completing tasks.
With some focus and practise on this manageable list of time management skills, you will see your productivity reach unprecedented new heights.
