Time management is an important skill to have. It doesn’t matter if you’re an employer, employee, work for yourself or stay at home to raise the kids. Being able to manage your time helps you in so many ways. You get more time to yourself and become more productive during the day. On the journey to good time management, there are certain mistakes that people make. Here are the ones you could be making.
Procrastinating, even with a reason
One of the biggest problems is procrastination. You may even think you have a reason, but it is just wasting your time right now. You should focus on the task at hand and just that task.
If you think about something else that needs to be done, make a note of it and go back to the task at hand. That will help avoiding forgetting about it when you can do the task.
Getting distracted by everything
Does a fight in the office distract you from working? Maybe the police cars racing down the street outside is a big distraction for you. Some people get distracted far too often and by the smallest of things.
When you’re trying to manage your time, you need to keep your focus on the task at hand. If everything distracts you, you need to find a way to handle that and stop it from being a problem. This can take time and will mean some reorganising in your office to help.
Thinking multitasking will help
Doing two things at the same time is going to help with managing time, right? It will cut down the time it takes to do all the tasks during your day. This isn’t quite true.
Unless you have developed a good skill at multitasking, it is the worst thing that you can do. You need to keep your concentration on one task at a time. Switching between tasks often means switching your mindset, which makes it much harder.
Struggling with scheduling everything
You have so much to do and you want to fit it into one day. That’s great, but you need to be realistic about the amount of time it will take to do everything. If something is going to take an hour, give yourself that hour in your schedule.
This helps you avoid putting too much on one day, so you actually get through your to-do list. If you try doing too much in one day, it will take you longer because you’ll feel the pressure.
Never creating the to-do list
You need to make a list of the things that need to be done during the day. The best thing is to prioritise your list to make sure you get through the necessary tasks if you do struggle with time management.
Your list will help you remember everything that needs to be done and often avoids pushing something onto the next day or the day after that. If you think of new tasks during the day, add them to your list.