Just a Few Time Management Tips
Alex Lu
For me, time management and organizing my workload is something that I still struggle with a lot especially now during summer break when I’m pretty much locked in and I don’t have the pressure of school weighing down on me. While I don’t have to deal with a lot of schoolwork, there are a bunch of other things outside of my academics that require my attention whether it be some personal project or something related to my extracurriculars and I’m sure the reader can relate with the struggle of trying to find the time to do finish all their tasks at hand. In an effort to assist the reader with their time management skills while also trying to improve upon my own, I’ve gathered a couple tips from the internet that I believe might help us in becoming much more efficient at planning our workloads accordingly.
Create a to-do list - Sometimes when you’re just up to your eyeballs in the amount of work you need to do it's hard to even remember all the things you’re supposed to be doing. Therefore, creating a to-do list allows you to visualize all the tasks that need to be completed which can be used for further planning. Plus, nothing compares to the satisfaction of being able to cross off tasks from the list once you’ve completed them. Personally while I usually only use this when I’m in a pinch, I actually recommend making it a habit of documenting your tasks as soon as they appear just so you don’t forget anything while in the moment of actually creating the list.
Eliminate distractions - While this one is actually a “no duh” kind of tip it’s one of those things that are easier said than done. To prove my point, think of all the times when you’re doing something and you decide to check your phone because “you’re bored.” Learning to identify and remove distractions is important so you can actually put more focus into doing your work and tasks that might take merely half an hour aren’t extended to two hours or more. Personally, to remove distractions from my work I usually do my work in an isolated area and keep my phone in some other room across the house. I’m sure many people do their work while listening to music and while I do the same a lot of the time, I’ve noticed that for things like writing or some activity that requires me to think or have “conversations in my head” total silence is actually preferred.
Learning to say “no” - I’m not too sure how many people will relate to this one but personally as someone who works in a youth group I would sometimes find myself accepting projects that I knew I didn’t have the time for simply because I couldn’t say “no” as I thought it would hurt somebody’s feelings. Learning to put my schedule before others was one of the harder things to do as I would sometimes feel guilty about doing so. However, overloading your schedule for the sake of others isn’t very efficient and you may end up falling behind or fail to complete certain tasks. Rather, learning to trust the rest of your team and being able to delegate the work among others is a much more efficient approach.
Take breaks - It’s really easy to call ourselves out for being lazy and consider resting as spending time unwisely. However, we should also recognize the importance of resting in between our work periods to ensure that we don’t get burned out. After all, I’m sure we all know how our work quality drops once we’re really tired. Prioritize those breaks but try to put a limit on how much you’re resting so you don’t end up spending too much time resting and not doing work.
You don’t have to be perfect - Sometimes we want to make sure that our work is exactly the way that we want it and while it’s good to put your best foot forward to make sure things go as planned it's not necessarily realistic to have such high expectations. In some cases, it’s much more important to actually finish the work rather than focusing on every small detail of it.
There are so many different things you can do to improve your time management skills and my small list here doesn’t even scratch the surface. Personally, there are some things here that I would love to work on such as my consistency in creating to-do lists and my ability to eliminate distractions. I’m sure you’ve heard some if not all of these tips but there’s a difference between hearing and actually doing. I might make a follow-up to this post in the future with more tips or I might just create a whole series of posts dedicated to tips for work habits but at this point, I’m not really sure. I hope you found this post useful and hopefully we can all improve our time management skills. Bye! :)
