4 Efficient Time-Management Strategies To Schedule Your Working Day

Sometimes, you have so much work to do that 24 hours don’t seem to be enough. However, entrepreneurs must know the unvarnished truth: to work better, you don’t need to work more, you just need to work smarter. Planning your schedule is the matter of creativity, so there is no sense in pushing yourself to do more than you can physically and/or mentally manage.

These tips won’t decrease the number of your everyday duties, however, with their help, you will learn how to get the most of your time resources.

Check these productivity strategies and get ready to implement them in your everyday practices!

#1 Prioritize Your Tasks

Most of us don’t really want to start their working day with something complicated and demanding. We are more likely to cope with some simple tasks in the morning, promising to ourselves that we will certainly do that boring and difficult one later. In a couple of hours, we find ourselves procrastinating. At the same time, these tasks might be more important and require more attention, and therefore – time. As a result, we miss deadlines.

Prioritizing is everything. Focus on the importance and urgency of your tasks to create a perfect to-do list. Try this ABCDE method:

• A – absolutely important and urgent tasks. If you fail to complete them on time, you will stand someone up, delay a project, get penalized, lose a customer, etc.
• B – important. The consequences are not going to cause a catastrophe, still, you really need to do this.
• C – good to be done, but not that vital. You won’t get into trouble if you will hold off on that for right now.
• D – tasks you can put under someone else’s care. Don’t forget to check if these tasks are in progress when you do.
• E – non-essential ones. These are the tasks you have to delete from your list.

Try to start your workday with the most crucial tasks instead of the easiest and less important. Also, don’t forget to remove the unimportant ones at all.

#2 Create A Realistic To-Do List

Now you can think about creating a to-do list to stay on track during the day and achieve all of your goals – short and long-term. Be honest to yourself and try to create a list that is realistic. If you overload yourself, you risk getting really frustrated. What is more, sometimes we plan tasks that we are not going to do. However, when it turns out that we have no time for them, we start perceiving this as a failure.

After you prioritize your tasks considering urgency and importance, you have to think about the possible amount of time you need to complete each of them. When you think about this, it makes sense to create a couple of such lists that are divided by the terms. For example, you may plan your day, your week, your month, and your year. Take a look at these lists and split each of them into smaller steps. You can use both your paper notebook, Word document or a specific application to do it.

#3 Don’t Kick Yourself – You Are Not a Super-Human

We all get distracted. Entrepreneurs, developers, professional writers, designers and everyone else watches YouTube, scroll Facebook, and browse online shops from time to time. It is the nature of the human brain to seek distractions and get into them more readily.

Instead of pushing yourself to reach the cosmic limits, try breaking your day into so-called “work sprints”. Make sure that you focus on the work entirely during such sprint and don’t allow yourself to get distracted. These periods must be followed by breaks when you devote your time to relaxing. For example, you can try working for 30 minutes and then having a short 10-minutes break. If this is not for you, then take small breaks at least every 100 minutes. Try different cycles and see what brings the best results.

#4 Forget About Multitasking

There are so many debates about multitasking and monotasking on the web. Some people claim that doing a number of different tasks at the same time is beneficial for you, however, we are on the yonder side. We believe that when you try to complete everything at once, you end up with low results. If your attention is divided into different channels, chances are that you won’t be able to execute any of your tasks effectively. Therefore, the results will be the opposite – instead of doing more, you will do literally nothing.

Monotasking seems to be more efficient to us because this method keeps you concentrated and allows you to think about problems and questions deeper. This way, creative ideas and really great solutions may come to your calm and focused mind.

Conclusion

As you can see, becoming more productive doesn’t mean that you have to work late into the night. Just think about your current schedule and habits, find the weak spots, think about the improvements basing on these tips, and make your working day much better! Remember: prioritize, create possible to-do lists, cycle the working and resting time, and monotask. This will surely help you get the most of your day!

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