Do you feel exhausted during the day and night?

Do you get the impression that life is full of problems to tackle?

Let's face it: Time is a limited resource, and you cannot create more of it. However, you can learn how to make the most of the limited time you have. Here comes the time management.

Although there could be multiple factors at play, you might want to look into your time management. Then, adopt certain basic principles to take back control of your day. Efficient time management may have multiple positive impacts, including:

- Reducing stress levels

- Improving your productivity

- And of course, freeing up more time for fun!

While we all understand time as a concept and run around it, we also have to grasp how important it is to manage. Since we all want to allocate more time to our loved ones, hobbies, or relax.

Almost everyone wants to increase their productivity and efficiency to create more time in their daily life. Therefore, everyone needs to find out which methods work best for us and which don't.

Here are a few tips that seem to work for most people:

Track your own time

Sounds easy. Everyone has a different way of doing it. But having a time tracking tool where you can see a lot of information in a single sheet also saves you time. It's an excellent method to identify our time wasters and weed them out.

Stay organized

Distractions are not always where you expect them to be. For example, searching for a document in a bundle of papers or messy digital files while your entire team is waiting for you. This could take a toll on your performance. So, although it might at first seem irrelevant, keeping your desk and computer well-organized is a major step towards time management.

Set objectives

Once you have cleared your workspace, start the day by deciding where you are headed. Spare just 10 minutes while enjoying your morning coffee to set the day's tasks. Pick no more than 3 to 5 objectives you should deliver during the day. Break them down to make sure that they are simple and measurable. You should be able to achieve each in roughly an hour of focused work.

Prioritize your objectives

Once the day's objectives are clear, the next step would be to prioritize them. This will help you stay flexible yet efficient. Even as unplanned issues will inevitably come up during the day, come the evening, you will have achieved most of your top goals. Simply mark the 2 or 3 most urgent and important objectives on your list.

Align objectives with your daily rhythm

Create a simple schedule in harmony with your energy level throughout the day. If, you are a morning person, deliver your most important objectives during your first work hours. And try not to leave anything too ambitious for the afternoon. At this point, it might be fruitful to log your hours in a time keeping software like BeforeSunset. Later on, to check how well you actually perform.

Create routines

If we create routines in our day to finish our tasks, they become so familiar that we don't spend much time doing them later.

Taking necessary breaks such as having a cup of coffee, chatting with a coworker, and so on creates an adequate time window. This also eliminates the distraction factor as we don't need to think about what we need to focus on during this period.

Know how to say no

Being able to refuse irrelevant tasks that might emerge during the day in a kind yet efficient manner is a top time management skill. This way, you will avoid being overwhelmed by secondary issues, and concentrate on areas where you can really make a difference.

Try to single-task

Although many professionals like to boast about multitasking, most of us know from our past experiences. We need to focus on a single task if we want to come up with a well-thought and sophisticated solution.

So when focusing on top priority objectives;

- Try to suppress the sources of diversion in the environment.

- Sharpen your focus

- Attempt to deliver them in an hour.

Don’t hyper-schedule

Keep it flexible: A business or family emergency may of course come up at any time during your day. So don't make a tight plan that can be derailed by a single event. Focus on the objectives rather than the exact hours.

Make a weekly review

Finally, it might be a good idea to spare some time every week to go over your time management performance.

Check your notes, and see how many of your objectives you have attained, and more importantly, what has kept you from achieving others. If you have logged in your hours on a time tracking software such as BeforeSunset during the week, this should take a couple of minutes, as you can get a weekly report which will give you a fairly good idea of what you can improve.

A key to time management:

Additional to all these points above and outside work, we do tend to save time in our daily chores. The reason for the invention of home appliances is purely because of this.

We tend to save time in order to do what we like. Spending time with our loved ones and be able to think from other perspectives that we usually don’t. This all behavioral pattern is because we all have plans for our future and present. This concept applies to our work environment as well. Therefore each action we take to manage our own and team’s time is more valuable than we think it is.

With BeforeSunset, we provide an easy way for you to allocate more time into doing what we love.

Try it to see how you can improve your business today!