Smart Time Management – Stay in Charge of Your Life

We all experience situations when the list of tasks looks endless, number of emails to reply uncountable, and more we do – more tasks are piling up. I am familiar with this nasty feeling of failure, inefficient performance, and constant stress…

I believe that life can be more exciting if we manage our time in a better way.

I this post, I will mention some approaches which don’t look too obvious.

Approach 1

Don’t list all your tasks sequentially and don’t start working on them in autopilot mode - take your time and assign a priority to each task. You will see that some tasks don’t add any value to you. In such cases, you will be able to delete these tasks from the list, or schedule them for later time. The same approach works well with emails. I am receiving around 150 emails per day, and I can’t afford to answer all of them. Based on my calculations, only 10%-15% of emails need my attention.

When it comes to emails, don’t hesitate to use the rule of 4Ds :

• Delete : more than 50% of emails can be deleted without any harm;
• Do : if the email is urgent or can be completed quickly;
• Delegate : if someone else can deal with the email;
• Defer : set some time later to deal with the emails which require some actions.

Approach 2

Identify your core values and your interests. Our daily activities should be aligned with these values. If it does not happen, you are feeling stressed, unhappy, and irritated because you are forcing yourselves to act against the values and interests you have set.

Approach 3

Don’t consider your daily schedule written in stone. You must allow some flexibility if it feels right. Sometimes, you need to add an urgent task or you can decide to take time off. I had a tendency to overload my schedule; and at the end of every day I felt exhausted, worn out, and unhappy. Creating a realistic daily schedule brings benefits to work and personal wellbeing.

Approach 4

Learn to say ‘NO’. Usually, we don't want to disappoint others by rejecting their request but, we disappoint ourselves by not having enough time to do what's important for us. We should keep our schedule manageable, and the list of tasks aligned with personal values and interests.

Approach 5

Know your limitations and strength. When you know yourself, you can manage workload wisely to avoid getting overwhelmed. You can manage your schedule and the tasks efficiently without taking more than you can handle.

We all share one common resource - time. It is limited by 24 hours a day, not less and not more… We must learn to manage these 24 hours wisely by making proper decisions where to invest time and where not to…