Time Management Tips to Increase Your Productivity and Success 

Plan Ahead
Planning your day, week and month keeps you aware of what will be coming your way next. Planning provides you the opportunity to identify your most important tasks and create prioritized “to do” lists for each day.

Prioritize
Not everything on your list is urgent or even important. Admit it, you often stack your “to do” list with tasks that are easy to accomplish and quickly check off your list, despite the triviality of those items. Instead, create three lists. Deal with true emergencies first; mark those items “urgent.” Create a second list; mark that one “important.”  If you absolutely must list the rest of the items you could tackle for the day, put them on a list reserved for only those items you will do “when time permits.” Author Gary Keller says, “You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.”

Limit Your List
Keep your lists of top-priority items—urgent and important– to no more than three items. You are not interested in appearing busy. Your goal is to become more productive by completing the tasks that net the biggest results.

Delegate
If you are fortunate enough to have a team, delegate to the person most suited to the requirements of each task.  Surround yourself with people who complement your strengths and weaknesses. By doing so, you will have greater confidence in your subordinates and, hopefully, a greater willingness to delegate, leaving you available to work on more important tasks.

Create More Hours in Your Day
You read that right. You can create more hours in your workday by breaking the day into smaller increments. Instead of looking at your day as eight hours, break your day into 30-minute increments. You now have at least 16 blocks of time in which to complete tasks.  Most often, the less time you give yourself to complete a project, the faster you finish it. Don’t believe it? Think about how quickly you can clean the entire house when you find out that relatives will be stopping by in ½ hour.

Keep a Time Journal
If you have ever lamented, “Where did the time go?” you might benefit from keeping a time journal for one week. Log everything you do in the week, day-by-day. In order to find gaps or wasted time, or to find a place to carve out a little “me” time each day, you have to know where you are losing valuable minutes each week. Write down everything in your journal–your time drinking coffee and watching the news in the morning, the number of times and how long it took you to walk to the copier to retrieve documents, meals, bathroom breaks, how much time at the nail salon, gym time, meeting time and the time it took to commute each way. Soon you will see the wasted minutes in your day so that you can strategize ways to save time for more important endeavors.

Think About Tomorrow, Tonight
Morning can be crazy hectic…dress for work, get the kids ready, eat breakfast, drop the kids at school or daycare, drive to the office. The list is long, at that’s before you have even started your “workday.” In the evening, you do it all in reverse and then have to figure out dinner too. You can save yourself time by planning a few things the night before. Lay out your work clothing and the kids’ school clothes the night before. Gather breakfast and dinner ingredients. You will not need as many take out meals during the week if you plan dinner and thaw the meat from the night before. You can keep a list on your phone of the menu for the day, or even menus for the entire week, and stop by the market on your way home for any necessary items. There is nothing worse than hitting the door, tired and hungry, only to realize that you are out of the salsa you needed for Taco Tuesday!

Create a Buffer
Just as important as scheduling your day, is scheduling some free time without a well-defined purpose. When you leave a portion of your day unscheduled, you create a buffer zone for the unexpected. Life comes at you fast, and you never know when an important client will just has to squeeze into your schedule or your son will need craft supplies for the science project he forgot about. Leaving yourself some wiggle room will help keep your day balanced and your sanity preserved.

Managing your time more effectively will help you accomplish more and feel a greater sense of success. However, when you create the schedule for your very full life, do not forget to leave yourself enough time for adequate sleep. Staying awake to review trade publications might seem like a good idea when you still have some energy at 10 p.m., but being sleepy the next day because you did not get enough rest will negate everything you are trying to do by better managing your time. If you have to, schedule your sleep time as well.