Be a successful Time Manager with these four Must-Try strategies

Hi there! Hope you all are enjoying the posts on LeisureReadz! Today’s post is the second post in “Work-Life Balance” series.Want to know and learn something new??
Ready? Lets begin! :) 

Try these Four time management strategies once to see a definite improvement in your efficiency and reduce some stress. Yes, you read it right! Stress!!! Now, why stress? Is there anyone who is always a game and happy? Someone who does every task easily and that too within time and without any problems or last minute issues? Ok. If there is a person like this then is this person a superhuman??? Chances of finding/knowing someone like this are almost next to none. So, it’s true... We all do feel stressed at least at some point of time or are stressed about certain things in life. Apart from certain relevant personal reasons for everyone, one factor I feel is constant for many of us and that is ‘TIME’.

May be because we underestimate our time or are not planning properly, it happens that we end up taking more responsibilities that we can actually handle. It may also happen that our productivity changes when some unforeseen issues pop up which relates to the beginning of stress as we are unable to prioritize the tasks and in the whole process end up feeling even more stressed. So, to avoid these situations, I am sharing four time management strategies which I learnt from reading some time management literature and feel sure that these can help reduce anyone’s stress when practiced.

So, here are the handpicked four strategies for you to apply to your routine. Even, I am focusing on implementing them and making use of these principles to improve myself at time management -

1. Eat the ugliest frog first: In his book “Eat that Frog”(one of my recent reads and loved this book by the way :)...), Management Guru Brian Tracy teaches and explains this simple principle. By Frog, he means the tasks that we have to do typically ‘today’ like writing an important email or sending some data or meeting someone, any important and urgent task; we try to postpone it till the end of the day. He says that it’s better to get it done first thing in the morning itself. There are benefits to this, when you do this first thing in the morning; nothing else is on your mind. So, you can work with more efficiency and focus. Plus, once it’s done, you don’t have to think about it anymore which relieves the stress.

Personally, I have read a couple of his books and found most of the tips are simple to understand and easy to try! I have tried this one and it seems to work! Can't compare the feeling of completing a difficult task earlier in the day!

2. 80:20 rule Pareto principle: Founded by a Management consultant, Joseph M. and named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, the Pareto principle, originally a business principle but has now become one of the most famous time management principles. Its beauty is that it is quite flexible and can be adapted to be used anywhere like food portion control in weight management, day planning, etc. What this principle states is that, the most important tasks in your day consume only 20% of your time whereas the less important tasks account for 80% of your time. Or say your performance is affected by actually only 20% of the work, rest 80% is more or less routine. By better understanding of this principle, we can ensure better time management to reduce stress and get more done with the 20% quota.

The Technique does seem appealing to me, however, haven't gotten to try this one yet.

3. Pomodoro technique: Famous as the 'Tomato TimerTechnique', this is a time management methods proposed by Francesco Cirillo. This puts forth an interesting concept of timing each task before hand at 25 mins timer, so that one works in time intervals of less than an hour at a time and one takes a short break post the interval. The background idea is that such frequent breaks could improve one's mental agility.

Lot of research these days emphasizes more on the importance of taking regular breaks to maintain efficiency and avoid burn out. When, I am loaded with tasks, I too try to take frequent breaks, well not exactly 25 mins as suggested but more or less like after 30-35 mins to keep myself from getting overwhelmed by the amount of tasks to be completed in a day. Seems to work!

4. Time matrix: Stephen Covey, the famous author of the best selling book " Seven habits of highly effective people " developed this matrix theory where one can prioritize the pending and upcoming tasks by categorizing them into four quadrants based on importance and urgency. Hers's a suggested link for a further reading.

Those were the strategies to help you plan your time and routine better. Let me know which ones you found interesting and worth trying.

Till the next post,
Stay punctual and feel motivated.

Cheers,