Time Management Skills: The 3 A’s To Achieve Success

Introduction

Time management is the decision-making process that structures, protects and adjust a person’s time to changing environmental conditions. The skills needed in this are crucial not only for work, but also for life in general. Now that the New Year resolution season is here, many people will be trying to figure out how to manage time better and be more productive. So how can we become better time managers?

Hundreds of books, articles, blogs, hacks and apps with convenient tools have been created to boost our time management. Yet the reality is that without the prerequisite time management skill set, even the best designed time management app or tool is unlikely to work. Research into time management has identified three particular skill sets that contribute to success in this. You must master all three of these skill sets to achieve effective time management performance. People who improve only one or two of these sets while ignoring or neglecting the others will generally not become great time managers.

Time management skill set 1: Awareness

This relates to thinking in a realistic way about your time by understanding it is a limited resource. Both effectiveness (doing things well) and efficiency (doing things fast) are critical tactics. To optimize these:

• Find your peak performance and peak energy times
• Create a time budget that details how you spend your hours during a typical week
• Record the time you have spent on tasks with very clear deadlines
• On completing a project, compare how long you thought it would take to how long it actually took
• Adopt a future time perspective, thinking about how tasks you’re doing right now will help or hurt you in the future
• Take a step back and assess the importance of any activity that you think might be taking too much of your time

Time management skill set 2: Arrangement

This relates to designing and organizing goals, plans, schedules and tasks to effectively use your time. This is the most familiar of the three skill sets, since the majority of time management advice, apps and hacks deal with scheduling and planning. Developing these skills is not about organizing your work to better control your life. It’s about taking control of your life and then structuring your work around it:

• Prioritize activities and obligations. You cannot just list out your tasks, to do lists and meetings.
• Understand and use the Eisenhower Matrix, which characterizes activities to do based on urgency and importance. You should categorize tasks into Urgent and Important (Do First), Urgent but Not Important (Delegate), Not Urgent but Important (Do Later, Schedule), and Not Urgent and Not Important (Don’t Do, Delete, Eliminate).

• Use a calendar app- record do dates for tasks and appointments immediately
• Schedule protected time- make a calendar appointment with yourself to block out uninterrupted time requiring your undivided attention (consider Pomodoro Technique)
• Reduce underestimation errors during planning by asking a neutral party for feedback about forecasted time requirements
• Break large goals into smaller chunks

Time management skill set 3: Adaptation

This relates to monitoring your use of time while performing activities. It includes adjusting to interruptions or changing priorities, which could involve high pressure or sometimes even crisis situations. You should deal with these with minimal upset, anxiety or distraction:

• Use habit stacking- piggyback your time management behaviors to favorable habits you already exhibit
• Ease overwhelming tasks by putting forth short bursts of greatest effort to avoid procrastination
• Try time tracker or checklist apps- only beneficial if the gains outweigh the time spent using the app
• If leaving yourself reminders, make them detailed enough that you understand the importance and quality of the task
• Consider best-case and worst-case scenarios when outlining possible outcomes of plans
• Reduce distractions and time wasters- phone on airplane mode, do not disturb time slots and block social media (again, the Pomodoro Technique)

Conclusion

By developing all three of these broad skill sets, you can put in place a system that helps you become a successful manager of your time.

If you would like to learn how to leverage your time management skills into learning simple online business systems that you can develop into extra income, a side hustle or a whole new work from home job, I invite you to check into Entre Institute.