9 Essential Time Management Skills to Get Things Done

The term time management goes in and out of fashion, depending upon how the researchers of the day feel about it, but you can’t deny the importance of time management to get things done.

If you possess excellent time management skills, you not only get more things done in a day, you are able to achieve your long term personal as well as professional goals.

So here is a quick list of essential time management skills for you, and why you need them

Skills that are must have, not just nice to have, to get things done and reach where you want to.

#1. Understanding the difference between urgent and important

Tasks that take you closer to your goals are important tasks. And tasks that must be completed within a deadline irrespective of whether they take you closer to your goals or not are the urgent tasks.

Now you take your pick. Which task should you focus on the urgent or the important?

The important ones, undoubtedly.

Now think about what type of tasks you are focusing on actually.

If you keep a record of tasks you complete every day, you should be able to do that easily. If not, it’s time you started keeping a record of what you do every day.

#2. Prioritizing

Even among important or urgent tasks not all are equally important or urgent.

Prioritizing is the art of deciding which task takes precedence over others.

If you are new to the practice of prioritizing, here is a quick tip.

When you look at a task, consider what will be the impact of not finishing it — on your short-term as well as long-term goals.

Better still, let me give you a step-by-step process to prioritize your tasks on a scale of 1–3 or 1–5, whatever is more comfortable for you.

1. Tag each task on your list as urgent and important.
2. Mark all the urgent tasks as 1 because whether you like it or not, the urgent tasks must be finished first, simply because they have their own deadlines. Of course I am assuming here that you don’t want to miss those deadlines!
3. Next, look at the important task one by one and think of the impact of not finishing it. Remember to consider your short-term as well as long-term goals.
4. Now, depending upon the severity of impact, start assigning these tasks a priority number (1–3/1–5).

Now you can start finishing the tasks according to their priority.

Two things to note here.

One, you can (and should) change the priority of any task any time depending upon new tasks that come up.

Two, as you practice this, you will become adept at giving each task their right priority.

#3. Using a calendar

A calendar is the place where all your tasks — every single one of them — should be.

Whether you use G Suite, smartphone calendar or customized office software, make some effort to use it as much as it has to offer.

Over the years I have helped many people manage their time well. When I go to their calendar I see sporadic things there like group meetings or reminders for some of the things that they think are very important.

Some use it to schedule their meetings as well.

If you are also using your calendar for sporadic things like meetings and reminders, you are leaving so much on the table.

Use your calendar to plan your whole day.

All your personal and professional tasks must go in there.

When you look at your calendar, you should be able to tell how busy or free you are in the coming week, month or year.

If you work for an organization that has an enterprise office solution and the calendar must be shared with everyone, use a personal calendar like Google calendar or even your smartphone calendar for that unified view of your engagements.

#4. Dividing a project, aka huge task, into smaller tasks

What do you do when a task is going to take you 20 hours to complete and you work only eight hours a day?

You break it down into smaller tasks that can be fit into a single day.

Good time managers know how to do this division in a way that the flow is maintained from one day to the next, and you do not waste precious hours in gaining momentum.

This comes with practice.

Start with randomly breaking down your projects into smaller tasks that can be completed over a couple of (working) days.

As you move forward, keep refining it and apply the learning from one project to the next one.

When you master this art, you will be able to move smoothly from one task to another in a way that at the end you have a cohesive project completed.

#5. Scheduling

Scheduling is nothing but assigning time frame or time blocks to any given task in your calendar.

Mastering this technique helps you mix tasks in a way that you make progress on all the different categories of tasks like office work or client work, personal commitments, marketing or networking, etc. every day.

The thing is, we humans are slaves of our habits. If you stop doing a certain category of task for a couple of days, you do not feel like picking it up again. Marketing or networking is a good example of this.

Use scheduling in a way that you do the important tasks every day till they become a habit for you.

A few tips for effective scheduling:

• Schedule ALL the tasks that you will do during the day into the calendar.
• The free time must be reflected by the gaps in those time blocks.
• If there is a leisure time that is very important to you, block that too.
• Use color coding for different categories of tasks like client work or office work, personal projects, leisure time, social obligations, marketing or networking, etc. This will help you glance at the calendar and know what your major focus is going to be during the day.

#6. Motivating yourself

You have planned a task and scheduled it in your calendar. But you actually need to complete it at the assigned time. And you need to be able to do that without fail every single time. Okay, most of the time. 😄

And that comes with motivation.

Motivation can come with two kinds of stimulus — internal or external.

If you get motivated just by thinking of the final outcome, that is an internal stimulus or motivator. If you can summon that, nothing like it.

However, if you find it difficult to summon your internal motivator, you can use external ones like:

• Accountability buddy who asks you whether you have completed a task or not
• Rewards that can be availed only at the end of a task

No, it’s not childish behavior if you reward yourself for completing a task. You need to celebrate smaller wins on the way to the larger goal. It works marvelously well to ensure you complete your work in time every time.

#7. Willingness to try new things

Let me remind you once more that getting into the habit of good Time management practices is not easy peasy.

You need a positive mindset and lots of support to achieve it.

In modern day, this support comes from a plethora of tools available with just a few clicks.

There are tools for creating to-do lists, project management (breaking down larger projects into smaller tasks that can be fit into a day), time tracking, scheduling, planning, and much more.

Be open to experimenting with them till you find the ones that fit your needs and support you in being more productive. The best part is that most of them allow you a free trial period and hence you can test them out without breaking your bank.

I myself keep trying new tools all the time and I have come across some real time saving gems on the way. As of now, these are top 4 tools that help me manage my time well:

1. Todoist
2. Toggl
3. Google calendar
4. Buffer

But before I zeroed in on these tools, I tried maybe hundreds of them.

I am still struggling to find the right automation and project management tools for me.

If there is something you use and are happy with, will you share that with me?

#8. Integrating calendar with email and productivity apps

Using all the tools in isolation will not help you in time management.

You need to integrate them in a seamless workflow.

And the first thing that you need to do is integrate your calendar with your email.

From there move on to integrating your productivity apps so that you always know what you have done and what needs to be done on a given day, week or month.

It will take time but then all skills take time to acquire.

When you master them it will be fun to see that the moment you mark a task completed in, say, your calendar, the status will get updated in your project management tool.

#9. Love for numbers

Last but not the least you must develop a liking for numbers; metrics that measure your productivity and time management skills.

As of now, do you know:

• How many hours of work did you do yesterday?
• How much free time do you have next week?
• When is the soonest you can plan a vacation because you would have completed your regular tasks?
• If you have time to take up the new course you have wanted to do for a long time?
• How much time did a project take?

If you do not have answers to these, chill. Most people don’t.

But start changing it today and get on top of your time management.

You can start with the easiest of them all — tracking the number of hours you spend in any task.

It is not only the easiest one to track, but the most useful too because it can be the starting point for many things.

When you track time spent for each task, you can combine time spent on all the tasks for a given project to find out how much time you spent for a project!

So what are you waiting for?

Download a time tracker or use a web version. But yes, you will need to test a few before you find the one that suits you best.

Wrapping up

I have said this earlier and I will say this again. Time management doesn’t come easy but there is nothing you cannot learn with practice. Start small and then build on it.

Imagine the day when you have finished all the tasks on your list and get going.

Honestly, if that can’t motivate you, nothing well!

My biggest motivator is to strike off the tasks listed in my super list. Because you see I have made a cap of 25 tasks at a time. Unless I finish them, I am not allowed to add new ones.

Because there is only so much that you can take on.