“I got million things to do, but had no enough time...”, is this your regular subterfuge when you missed the deadline. Maybe, you just ran into a problem on managing time.
A good time management helps efficiently plan and keep control of time that you spend on specific tasks, and finally boost your productivity. Here, we summarize 15 time management techniques plus 10 best time management tools for you to utilize your time and efforts smartly.
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Carrying out a good time management will bring a series of benefits, to your career, also to your personal life, as we list in the following:
Plan making helps you to mentally and physically prepare for the incoming tasks, when your days begins, you set about doing the scheduled things right away, there won't be any delays. To make a plan, we need to:
List all the work you need to complete on a paper or on your computer. A to do list helps you to have a basic understanding about how many workloads you will have to deal with, also make it possible for you to bring all these items into a good order.
Now you need to organize your job basing on the to-do list.
If your job involves login into different accounts a lot, you’d better remember all those usernames and passwords on your working device, by using a built-in plugin or a professional tool, such as LastPass.
If you job requires enormous email writing, you’d better create a template for those repeated and similar email writing, then you will get more time to work on those with higher demands.
If you need to make a lot of phone calls everyday, you need to write down those key points and well organize your language to make the phone call.
Never procrastinate, take the actions right now. Don’t ever think about delaying your work to afternoons or the next days. Don’t be hesitate, make your decision and follow the scheduled timeline. Otherwise, you plan will go back into chaos and you need to adjust a lot to remedy such a delay. Furthermore, you will slack off in your work.
If you can work on a computer, then never work on a phone, also, mute all those programs that irrelative to your work on your devices.
We need to be extremely focused on our job, this can be easily fulfilled if we have a strong self-control. But if we are kind of weak on this, we need to remove distractions from those activities may divert our attentions.
The most attention-distracting things are all about notifications from those websites or apps we saved for entertainments, they can always grab our eyes and tempt us to check what’s going on out there. In this case, a tool to lock these websites and apps would be practically useful, such as Focus, which can stop us from using some websites or programs in our working time.
Keeping notes help us to figure out where we are on the long to-do list, also enable us to fast pick the job up where we left off for the last time, so we don’t miss anything without noticing it.
If you have a team, ask for cooperation. Each member in your team has their own advantages, which means they are able to handle with specific things with higher efficiency than you.
For each task, track the spent time, write them down and have a comparison, checking if there is any possibility to improve your efficiency, or adjust a little bit according to the results.
You may get requests from others, and with the mind to be collaborative, you accept but only to find that these requests are just obstacles standing in your way to achieve your goals. Then, learn to say NO, especially you are getting some requests that is not your responsibility, or you are not the only one can fulfill such a request.
Working consumes energy. We need to take enough rest, preparing us well mentally and physically to face the work in the following day.
Our way to manage time or do a job cannot be perfect at the first beginning, we need to look back and think again and again, checking if we miss something important, or if we still have the chances to make greater process.
When you get things done fast and better than you expect, reward yourself to have a good dinner or buy something you have been longing for for a long time. If you can get a kick out from your job, even get a loved gift, your job will be more than just a job.
If you find yourself having problems to obey the rules, you can find someone act as your supervisor. Every time you break the rules or miss the deadline of your task, you will get punished commercially or something else.
Between the intervals of tasks, we get some pockets of time, if we still feel energetic and passionate, utilize this time to think about for your following tasks or finish those jobs that are necessary but taking just a little time. Also, if you have enough time on your weekends, you can spend part of your weekend to accomplish some tasks, if you feel like to.
Time management techniques are more like theoretic rules we should obey to get a good time management, but time management tools will facilitate us to be consistent to these rules. Here we pick 10 best time management tools for our users.
Asana is a project management app helps team communication and collaboration, saving you from shuffling between webpages, programs, documents or chatting group. Asana can create projects and tasks within the program, adding team members participate in a project, allow file sharing, communicate and co-work.
Asana boasts itself in scheduling projects in a special calendar, organizing tasks according to priority and helping users to focus on the project.
It is a time management app to create to-do lists and create tasks within the program, no matter the lists are for your work, school, groceries, movies or household tasks. You have the power to organize the list according to your own rules, to customize the interface to your taste. With its “My Day” feature, users can get suggestions on which task should be completed first.
Since it is the program Microsoft developed to replace the Wunderlist, To-Do extends its feature of having tight integration with office 365, which is instrumental for users work with Microsoft on a regular basis.
Another time management tool to create to-do list and help focus your energy on the right things. It is cloud-based, which means all your tasks on the list will be synced on different devices. Besides, users can work offline to add tasks, create filter, add comment if they cannot access to network.
Unlike other to-do list apps, it is available on different platforms, iOS, Android and Windows.
It helps users to understand their daily habits by tracking, measuring and categorizing their activities. The program will run in the background on a computer or other mobile device, then track the time spent on each application or website, finally yield a report to tell you how have you spent the time and stimulate users to improve efficiency.
With its alert feature, users will be reminded when they have spent a certain amount of time on an activity, which the block feature, helps user to focus on their tasks without diverting by others.
Another time-tracking program has won large popularity from users. It allows users to add time manually and delete unwanted entries, to make this program track and analyze as needed.
It is extremely easy to use, the spent time can be tracked and presented in a report according to user settings. Even you forget to track, it will give reminders to remind you of tracking the time.
Cisdem Focus is an easy-to-use app to block distracting apps and websites during your focus time. It offers Pomodoro, scheduling and other ways to plan your focus time. This way, you can easily create a distraction-minimized environment when you want to focus on your task.
Evernote is considered as the best note-taking app to capture, organize and share notes from anywhere. You can add links, checklists, tables, attachedments, and even audio recordings to your notes, gaining unlimited freedom to take notes for your purposes.
In addition, Evernote can search handwritten notes by performing OCR on the image text, which is particularly helpful when you rush to take screenshot for a note taking.
Another app to keep notes. It allows to sort contents across notebooks, sections and pages, user can also highlight, annotate, clip and share notebooks. Even, users can record audio notes and insert online videos.
Same as Evernote, OneNote can recognize text from images and allows users to copy the text to create a new note.
Airmail is a fast and beautiful mail client for Apple users, supporting for iCloud, MS Exchange, Gmail, IMAP, POP3, Yahoo!, Outlook, etc., to mange your single or multiple email accounts. Airmail also integrates with quite a lot of applications to boost productivity, such as Calendar, Reminders, Todoist, etc.
Fast responsiveness is the main reason why so many users pick Airmail, it just allows users to switch between different accounts fast, so you can reply and check messages as fast as you can.
A program to remember and manage dozens, even hundreds of password and sync all the saved passwords across all platforms.
You just need to remember the master password, and lastPass will remember the rest. In addition, it provide high level safety to protect your data, even LastPass cannot access to your passwords.
To well manage your time, time management techniques are essential. In addition to make full use of those techniques, time management tools can greatly contribute to the productivity improvement. A person knows how to manage time, is a person that will obtain happiness and success both in their career and personal life.
Connie has been writing for Mac productivity and utility apps since 2009. Each review and solution is based on her practical tests, she is aways energetic and trustworthy in this field.
