Time is an essential resource that cannot be overemphasized. Once time is gone, it cannot be retrieved; hence, people have to be careful with the way they make use of their time. The best way to do this is to know how to manage time. We want you to utilize your time well; therefore, we will provide you with amazing tips on how to learn time management.
However, before we get to that, let’s look at what time management is.
What Is Time Management? – How to Learn Time Management
Time management is the act or process of planning and organizing how your time is divided between different tasks and activities.
It helps one to effectively make use of their time to be productive and efficient.
People who can attain a lot in a short time are not miracle workers.
They can perform their task and engage in their activities and come out with good results because they have mastered the art of time management.
As we proceed, you too will learn and know how to manage time effectively.
What are The Benefits of Learning Time Management? – How to Learn Time Management
To boost your motivation to learn time management, we will look at some of the benefits of learning it.
These benefits include:
Increased Productivity
When you learn time management and put it to good use, you will be able to do more work.
You will organize, plan your tasks and activities, and focus on them one at a time.
As a result, you will get more things done in time and also get good work quality.
Hence, when you learn time management it will help you to increase your productivity.
Reduce Stress – How to Learn Time Management
When you have a lot to do and little time, you can get overwhelmed.
You can also get overwhelmed when you have enough time and poor planning.
This can make your stress level increase.
However, when you know how to effectively manage time, you will utilize your time well, no matter how short it might be.
As a result, your stress level will reduce
Increased Energy
If you spend your time doing irrelevant things, it will deplete your energy.
As a result, when you are ready to do those important things, you will be less inspired and tired.
However, when you learn time management, you will know to focus first on those things with high priority.
This will help you finish in time, and also build your momentum to keep doing other tasks and activities.
So, instead of feeling tired, you will feel pumped and energized to accomplish those things you need to accomplish.
Increased Advancement Chances – How to Learn Time Management
When building your career or business, time management helps to better your chances of building them up to be successful.
This is because it helps you to focus, be productive, and be efficient while maintaining a stress-less and well-balanced work-life.
All of this can then work together to ensure that you grow and succeed.
So, learning time management can help to increase your advancement chances or your growth.
More Positivity/ Satisfaction
Good time management helps you to make good use of the time you have in getting your task and activities effectively done.
It helps to ensure that you are not behind at work and are productive.
This, in turn, makes you satisfied with your tasks or job and yourself.
As a result, it boosts your confidence in yourself and your abilities and makes you a more positive person.
More Free Time – How to Learn Time Management
Everybody enjoys free time where they can just relax, unwind, be themselves, and have fun.
However, not everybody gets enough free time.
This is because some people don’t know how to plan their time.
Hence, they struggle with their time to finish their daily or weekly tasks.
As a result, it destroys any chance they have to get free time.
However, when one learns to manage their time better, they will plan and focus on their task.
Ultimately, this will make them finish up faster and have enough free time to spend on whatever they want.
The Ps of Time Management – How to Learn Time Management
To fully understand and learn time management, you need to know the three Ps of time management.
They are basics that will help guide you as you learn time management.
These P’s are:
Planning – How to Learn Time Management
If you don’t plan, you fail to plan.
So, if you want to avoid this, you need to plan.
When you plan for something, you will know most things about it.
Yes, you might not know everything, but having an idea of what you are doing will help you scale through expected and unexpected problems and issues if they arise.
However, when you don’t plan, you will be faced with problems and issues, and struggle with succeeding.
This can cause you to feel overwhelmed, stressed, and unorganized.
So, you need to understand the need for planning.
It might not give you immediate results.
However, it will help you to achieve your desired outcome later on.
So, for you to learn time management, you need to inculcate the habit of planning.
Spending a few minutes to plan the next day does more good than harm as it will give you a clearer and better view of the coming day.
Prioritizing
Prioritizing is the act of putting things into perspective.
In other words, it is the act of giving importance or identifying important things among several things.
If you don’t prioritize you will struggle with trying to do or fit all your tasks and activities into the limited time you have.
This is why prioritizing put things into perspective.
It makes you see what “needs” to be done and what “has” to be done.
Performing – How to Learn Time Management
The last P of time management is performing.
You can plan and prioritize and not achieve anything if you don’t perform.
Performing is all about staying focused on the task you have at hand and completing it, before moving on to the next.
While performing, you will be faced with things that will want to take your focus away.
Hence, you have to be prepared for them.
Skills That Will Help You Manage Time Better – How to Learn Time Management
Now that you know the three P’s of time management, we will be looking at something different.
You have to understand that learning time management cannot happen overnight.
This is because learning is a gradual process.
You have to keep building and developing yourself till you get it right, and even when you have gotten it right.
When it comes to time management, there are certain skills you should acquire, develop, and improve.
These skills are:
Prioritization – How to Learn Time Management
Prioritization is an essential skill in achieving good time management.
It is the skills to effectively give importance to or identify important tasks or activities among others.
Without effective prioritization skills, you will struggle with effectively managing and making use of your time.
Organization Skills
Organization skills help you to put things in order while you make plans and perform your tasks or activities.
It also helps you to have a clear understanding of what your tasks and activities are.
If you cannot effectively organize your things and day, you will struggle with keeping up with the plan you made.
Goal-Setting – How to Learn Time Management
Goal-setting is another essential skill for time management.
This is because goal-setting skills help you to better understand your ultimate goals and what needs to be prioritized to achieve them.
For example, if your goal is to gain market dominance, then you will need to forgo some tasks for others that will help you to achieve your goal.
This will help you to easily prioritize and focus on those tasks that will enable you to achieve your goal.
Check here to discover more about goal-setting practices for business success.
Stress Management
You have to take care of your mental state or health when you practice time management.
This is because stress might come even when prioritizing, planning, and performing.
Yes, good time management reduces stress.
However, you need to understand that stress can still come while managing time and working.
So, it should be a priority to ensure that it doesn’t affect your mental health and otherwise.
For you to ensure this, you need to know how to handle the stress that comes with time management positively.
Delegation – How to Learn Time Management
You have to understand that you cannot do everything on your own.
Some of your tasks have to be given to someone else to ensure that you make use of your time effectively.
Hence, you need to possess good delegation skills.
Tips on How to Learn Time Management
We have discussed the different basics related to time management.
Hence, by now we are hoping you have a better understanding of what time management is.
Also, we hope that you have gotten more motivated to learn time management.
So, let’s see the tips that will guide you to learn time management.
1. Understand The Way Your Time is Spent
To learn time management, you need to look at how you have been making use of your time.
The best way to do this will be to record everything you do for one or two weeks at every 15 to 20-minute intervals.
When you do this, evaluate your results by asking and answering the following questions:
- Was everything that was needed to be done, accomplished?
- Which tasks or activities required more time?
- What is your most productive hour of the day?
- What do you devote the most time to (i.e work, personal, family, recreation)?
When you have answered these questions, identify those tasks that are more time-consuming.
Also, determine if you are using your time to do those most important tasks and activities.
When you can track and understand your tasks and the required time for each of them you will find it easier to plan and estimate your time for each task you have.
2. Learn to Prioritize – How to Learn Time Management
As you now know, prioritizing is an important aspect of time management.
Hence, you need to learn how to prioritize.
For you to know how to prioritize, you need to understand the difference between the following:
Important and Urgent Tasks/ Activities
These types of activities or tasks need to be done very quickly.
This is because they are important and have urgency attached to it.
Some examples of this type of tasks and activities are:
- Submitting your job application at a specified time
- Taking your sick child to the hospital from school
As you can see from the examples, they are something that should not be postponed.
Hence, they need to be prioritized above other tasks or activities.
Important and not Urgent Tasks/ Activities – How to Learn Time Management
These tasks or activities are those that require action but not immediately.
However, they should be done eventually.
It is best to get them done after you finish those important and urgent tasks.
Some examples of this type of task are:
- Scheduling a dentist appointment
- Replying to email concerning future happenings
- Planning a family reunion
As you can see, these tasks need to be done.
However, if you do them before the important and urgent tasks, you will struggle with finishing all your tasks.
So, prioritize important but not urgent tasks after important but urgent tasks.
Not Important and Urgent Tasks/ Activities
These tasks are not important but urgent.
Hence, they should be prioritized after important and not urgent tasks.
You do not have to do these tasks yourself.
In other words, you can have them delegated to someone appropriate to handle them
Some examples of these tasks include:
- Helping your child with homework
- Weeding the flower beds
- Making dinner
Not Important and Not Urgent Tasks/Activities – How to Learn Time Management
These tasks should be the last prioritized.
They are not important or urgent; so, you should not spend your time on them.
However, if you have free time, you can engage in them.
These tasks and activities are often viewed to be time-wasters.
Some examples of them include:
- Responding and chatting on social media
- Online shopping
- Finishing a TV show
You can delegate some of these tasks to people if you feel the need to do them.
3. Get and Stay Organized
Being disorganized can cause poor or bad time management.
Hence, as you learn to manage time, you have to get and stay organized.
De-clutter your surroundings and put everything in its right place.
This way, you will know where to check when looking for something without wasting precious time searching.
As a result, you will perform better.
4. Delegate – How to Learn Time Management
You cannot do everything by yourself.
So, you need to delegate, outsource, and get assistance from people.
The best tasks to delegate are those not important and urgent tasks.
So, when you have such a task on your list, do not hesitate to delegate or outsource.
5. Stop Procrastinating
Several people procrastinate for several reasons.
Most often the reason they do this is because the tasks they are putting off seem unpleasant or overwhelming.
Whatever their reasons are, procrastination does not help anyone make good use of their time.
So, as you learn time management, you have to ensure that you stop procrastinating.
The best way to do this is to tackle that unpleasant or overwhelming task in the early hours of your day.
When you get this done early, you will be able to move on without dreading doing them later in the day.
Another thing that you can do to stop procrastinating is by breaking down those unpleasant or overwhelming tasks and doing them bit by bit.
Whatever option you chose, try to build a rewarding system that will help you stay motivated till your task is completed.
6. Avoid Multitasking – How to Learn Time Management
Multitasking does more harm than good when it comes to time management and being productive.
This is because joggling different tasks at once can break your focus, waste your time, and reduce your productivity.
Hence, you need to avoid multitasking.
Rather than multitasking, focus on the task at hand, finish up, and then move on to the next.
7. Schedule Appropriately
Scheduling is the act of planning and arranging your tasks and activities to take place at a specified time.
To manage time, you need to learn to schedule appropriately.
You can learn to do this, by doing the following:
- Write our your tasks based on their priorities
- Allocate the time required to finish each task
- Plan your challenging tasks or activities for your peak period of the day
- Protect the time allocated to highly prioritized tasks and activities from being interrupted
When you have created your schedule for the day, week, or month, ensure that you follow it and avoid unproductive activities.
8. Handle Time-Wasters – How to Learn Time Management
Time-wasters are also referred to as distractions.
They take our focus off our tasks and can ruin our performance.
Hence, you need to learn to handle them.
These distractions can be messages, devices, unexpected visits, meetings, and so on.
Whatever they might be, ensure that you develop a good working system to limit or avoid them.
9. Learn To Say “No”
For you to effectively learn to manage time, you need to reject things that are outside your ability and time.
Yes, it is great to help others out.
However, you shouldn’t let it become a regular occurrence as it will cause issues with your plans.
You are the one who knows your time limit.
So, if you know that an offer or a request will have an impact on focusing and achieving your prioritized task, then don’t hesitate to say no.
10. Take Breaks – How to Learn Time Management
While time has to be used and managed well, the body needs rest.
If you don’t plan to rest, all your time planning will fall out.
So, as you plan, prioritize, and perform, ensure that you take breaks.
However, ensure that your breaks are not too long to avoid eating into the time you should use to perform your task or activities.
Conclusion on How to Learn Time Management
Time management is important for personal and professional growth.
Hence, if you do not want to miss its benefits and grow, then you need to learn time management.
You can learn to manage time by learning to prioritize, staying organized, avoiding procrastination and multitasking, and learning to schedule properly.
