Time management is possibly the biggest question in your life if you are reading this post. Everybody encounters this problem in everyday life - managing day-to-day tasks amongst busy schedules and deadlines (possibly also the word hated by most people). We can always not complete the assigned tasks in time and provide reasons for the doing so. Of course, we will certainly have reasons for not doing something.
The point is: Is it healthy to do so? certainly not - because not doing something means that the task is either postponed or rejected. Continuous postponing will result in accumulation of tasks and it is really hard to break the chain later. We need to put hell lot of time and effort to finally catch up with the schedule. Similarly one cannot simply survive by rejecting the tasks. This will spoil their career and it might be a full stop to their business. So how to complete tasks in a given time? There are 3 key tips to do this.
Not Procrastinating:
Procrastination is often considered as the best solution to put off work and the accompanying pressure. Most of us don't realize that by procrastinating, we are not reducing the pressure but building it up to erupt one day, not so later. The time taken to reject or postpone a task can simply be used to actually doing the task. I have written a post on the characteristics of procrastinators and why people procrastinate, so I will not go into the details here.
The point is, in telling yourself to do this later and repeating the same several times a day, you will gain nothing but lose hell lot of time and effort. The time you think that you save today by procrastinating should be put to use in double to accomplish the same task tomorrow among tomorrow's other tasks. Likewise, by procrastinating, you already preoccupy tomorrow and there is no room for the actual tasks of tomorrow. This is nothing but making things worse.
Misjudging the time needed:
Every task requires some fixed amount of time to be completed. So when you are about to take up a task, it is up to you to decide the time you need to accomplish it. The time to accomplish a particular task differs from person to person. Some will finish the work in an hour while the same work will take a couple of hours for others depending on their knowledge and expertise in the field. People's working style also differs.
So you know yourself. Allotting the correct amount of time you think will be needed to finish a task is a good practice. Such people will not have the chance to complain that they were not given enough time. If you need to attend a meeting at 9'0 clock in the morning, you plan your travel, taking into account the waiting times at the cross road signals, possible traffic jams and so on. Similar is the case. You know the time you need to finish the task, you know the deadline, so the start the task accordingly.
Being Organized:
Being organized is one of the prime requirements for time management and in order to be productive. You could simply waste 2 minutes per project in looking for client addresses. Adding up, this may end up in an hour wasted if you deal with 30 projects a day. Alternatively you could spend ten minutes a day in maintaining a file for client addresses for each project.
Disorganized persons simply waste time in doing the same things again and again and they are not able to work effectively. The time and effort they spend in doing 10 things a day can be used to actually accomplish twenty things in the same day.
