Have you ever found yourself at a loss for moments? Do you always go through your days wondering where all the time went? Maybe you’ve been told before that you need to learn how to manage your time better.
A lot of people don’t know how to do this time management thing correctly because it makes them feel trapped, or they believe that they don’t have enough of it. In reality, there is always time. It is just what you do with it that matters. Therefore, you have to know how to manage your time with whatever resources you may have.
Time management is one of the most heavily coveted and highly regarded skills of this Era. But a lot of people don’t know what it’s for beyond the fact that it’s necessary. But why is it regarded as a necessity to learn how to manage your time? You couldn’t possibly spend whole days doing just one thing, could you? In truth, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Without any of the proper knowledge about time management, you could spend more time than usual doing things that shouldn’t take time at all. To manage your time, you need to know a few things, like its importance and how you can do it. In this article, I will be discussing the merits of time management and some very cool ways to manage the little time on your hands.
The Importance of Time Management
Let’s say you’re a college student working on your first degree. Generally, you’d have several things to worry about, wouldn’t you? First is your schedule, which would naturally include a bombardment of classes followed by more classes. You would still have to spend a considerable part of your leisure studying or doing something to that effect. Not to talk of the countless students’ association meetings and events, a lot of which you would find yourself unable to decline.Â
Though, there is only so much you can do at random without taking a minute to ask yourself what you’re doing. How could you possibly take on everything without developing some way to make each minute count? Here are some benefits of proper time management.
1. It Gives You Some Balance
What is living without balance? Whatever it is that you do, one of the most important things to have is a sense of feeling like everything is going accordingly. When you know how to manage your time, this is what you’d get. Everything that you know you should be doing would be done in earnest rather than postponed or hung up in the air. It is one of the great benefits of proper time management.Â
Read: 15 Tips For Maintaining a Healthy Lifestyle
2. It Helps You to Be More Intentional
Time management can also help you be more intentional and logical with your wants and desires. It is a form of self-discipline that gives you the best of everything that you set your mind to achieve. You’d always know what to do and when, and therefore you would be able to make better decisions that only influence your needs in positive ways.
It would also include the ability to say no and ask for help when needed. In essence, whatever couldn’t possibly fit into your schedule would either be discarded, outsourced, or cut down. In this sense, you would start to feel yourself becoming a more efficient person in your exploits.
3. You Almost Always Have Time to Spare
Even when you have so much to do with your time, you’ll come to find that managing your time the right way will help you have a lot more free time. Think of time management as being on a budget – budgets help you save money the same way that time management can save you time.Â
Therefore, you would come about excesses of time once in a while, the same way that your savings may overflow if you strictly follow your budget. If you create a detailed schedule that includes all your tasks, both small and mighty, and then give them stipulated time stamps, you’d be surprised at how much extra time you’d find in there.Â
How to Manage Your Time Properly
By now, you ought to know that time management is a useful skill to cultivate no matter what you do or where you find yourself. By default, the next order of business would be to find new and effective ways to manage your time properly.Â
So what can you do to make these visions of a more collected life for yourself come true? Below are some ways to help you to manage your time well
1. Create Schedules
The first and most important rule of managing your time well is creating suitable schedules with allocated times and durations for each of your tasks. There are many different formats that you could use to make your schedule. You could create a timetable or a roster that could stand alone or connect to a calendar or means of time measurement.
You ought to arrange every task on your schedule in order of priority. It could be in the order of the most important or urgent. But, some people prefer to keep theirs in order of less importance or urgency. Doing it this way would help you know which jobs to address first before others.
2. Reduce Procrastination to the Barest Minimum
Procrastination is probably the most friendly enemy to the average worker. It has a way of disguising itself as being to your benefit, but if you procrastinate too much, you’ll find yourself not moving forward. Rather than postponing activities, it would be way better to split them into small bite-sized sections.
This way, you kill time by doing small parts of what you need to at regular intervals. It might seem like very little, but when allowed to pile up, rescheduled tasks can take up a lot of your much-needed time. So rather than feel regret in retrospect, wouldn’t it be better to address your problems in small installments?
Read: How to Stay Motivated Every Day When You wake Up
3. Learn How to Say “No!”
There are times when you can drop some things of your own to make way for other people’s work. Other times you’d have to stamp your feet down and say no. The importance of that abrasive word is an underestimated one. A lot of people see rejection as bad manners, but in reality, it’s a useful trait to have when you know when to tap into it.
Learning how to decline requests can be very instrumental in helping you set much-needed boundaries. Moreover, the more you reject people, the more confident you will be in your ability to juggle tasks priority-wise. Not only is rejecting offers and propositions helpful in time management skills, but it is also beneficial for your emotional and mental health.
4. Be Flexible
Flexibility is not an excuse to postpone things unnecessarily but a caution to prepare for the worst possible case scenario. There may come times when it is necessary to reschedule tasks due to the development of more important ones.
During these situations, you should not panic or reel but rather set new realistic schedules and time yourself according to your needs at that period.
