Essential and Effective Time Management Tips for Busy People

You can’t buy more, use what you’ve go effectively

Your life is only time – your time is your life, you can’t buy any extra, and none of us know how much we’ve got! It’s precious, so use it well and prioritise achieving your goals.

Easier said than done, in order to manage your time successfully you’ll need two key skills: assertiveness and self-discipline.

1           Make a list of goals. What do you enjoy? What would like to do more of? What do you want to achieve? Be honest, don’t put down what you think are ‘worthy’ goals, you need to believe in what’s on your list. They may be work related or personal, large or small, but they need to be specific enough so that you can imagine yourself achieving them.

Put everything you want to achieve on this list – even really large goals (you’ll break these down into smaller tasks to achieve later).

If you write down your goals they are MUCH more likely to come true, for reasons I don’t have time to go into here, yet most people never even take this first step!

2          Split your goals list into two – a master list of everything and a small daily list of ‘next actions’ and daily to do items.  Combining everything onto one list won’t work.

3          Prepare your daily list (ideally between five and ten things) on a daily basis (!), preferably the evening before. Doing it then will help you sleep better as you won’t be thinking about what you need to do tomorrow. 

Don’t fill your day, and make sure to take account of pre-booked appointments.  Some items might be ‘next actions’ to help you towards your larger goals.  Remember to consider how long each thing will take so you don’t put too many long tasks into your day.  Leave yourself room for the unexpected urgent task and breaks.

On the days when you don’t have anything work related or urgent you can pick up more ‘next actions’ for your larger projects which should be broken down into smaller tasks e.g. if your goal is to re-decorate the spare room, don’t write that as a daily task – you’ll never do it.  Write down the first step – ‘pick the paint colour you want to use’, next time it’s ‘buy the paint’ and so on.

4          Good time management will require you to break your ‘Be Perfect’, ‘Hurry Up’, or ‘Please Others’ habits – if you have them.

Be Perfect – spending excessive amounts of time trying to achieve perfection

Hurry Up – perhaps you think time is short so everything gets rushed

Please Others – filling up your time helping others achieve what they want

5          Another evil preventing effective time management is procrastination.  Often caused by seeing a goal as ‘too big’ or ‘too scary’ (by the way having slightly scary goals is exciting!). Procrastination is a battle between the conscious and subconscious parts of your brain.  Your conscious brain says ‘I really must….’ but your subconscious brain says ‘ooo no, that’s too hard, too much effort – let’s watch telly instead’ and in the end you end up not making an impact on your goals at all.

There are plenty of ways to tackle procrastination - in fact there’s a whole articl just on procrastination alone!

How to Stop Procrastinating - by Tina Worthing (substack.com)

6          But making a list of goals and actions isn’t enough on its own.  You need to be able to negotiate with people (including yourself) about when tasks are done, to what standard and if there’s a conflict of priority what’s most urgent.

7          You also need to practice saying ‘no’. If you’re a people pleaser this is difficult. Saying ‘no’ isn’t rude if it’s done constructively.  Explain the reason for your ‘no’, not enough capacity, other more urgent tasks etc.

8          When deciding what to put onto your daily list you need to consider certain elements of each goal/task.  Is it urgent? Is it something you must do? Is it important? Is it something you want to do? Is it fun? How long will it take?

9          Don’t do all the fun things first – apart from the fact you may miss deadlines for urgent items, your list will end up being full of the less interesting tasks.  Similarly, don’t do all the quick jobs first – these are great for fillers, or for when you need a ‘quick win’.  Check important tasks for future deadlines, don’t leave them too long otherwise they will become important and urgent and you may not have the time to complete the task to the standard required. 

10        If you find you are not achieving the tasks on your daily list because you haven’t got enough time don’t work longer hours - in fact working long hours means you’ve failed! Instead learn what you can achieve in a day and revise your list accordingly.

11         Every time you decide to do something you are also deciding NOT to do everything else. Are you sure that the thing you have decided to do at this point in time is the right one?

12        Be assertive about interruptions and bad meetings. It’s YOUR life that’s being wasted. Assertiveness = courage + honesty. Have a no-crap policy in your life.

13        Put all you actions into a single diary/planner. Electronic is good as it’s easier to make changes, but paper is fine – the important thing is that everything is in one place. Whatever you used it should be small enough to always have with you.

14        Your list(s) are not static, review regularly, you should be removing those tasks you have achieved – but what new ones do you want to add? 

Remember -

If something isn’t important then don’t worry too much about doing it too well (fight your Be Perfect habit)

Faster is not always good (fight your Hurry Up habit)

Saying ‘no’ is vital – if you don’t, your life will gradually fill up with things you don’t want to do (fight your Please Others habit). If you find it difficult to say ‘no’ an alternative is to negotiate – you can offer to do it later, spend less time on it, only do part of it, get help with it, etc.

Small things can be important

A “Must do” task, like buying food, isn’t necessarily urgent

A good list will mix work related and personal goals

Managing your time will give you a feeling of control and progress and will greatly reduce your level of stress.

So, what are you waiting for?  Go make your list – and top of that list? Make a list for tomorrow 😊