Follow These Three Simple Steps To Effectively Manage and Organize Your Time

If there is one thing in this life that we all have in common, it is time. Everyday, we have the luxury to spend 24 hours, 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds of our lifetime. Sounds a lot? Yes, but not quite. At first glance these numbers are totally overwhelming. However, if we do not commit on using it wisely, a precious day in our lives can quickly turn into vapor right in front of our very eyes.

In the beginning of the second industrial revolution, people started to see that time is a very limited human resource. And with it, the working population started shifting their focus on understanding the concept of time management, as they identify an effective method of getting things done faster and with less effort. This quandary resulted to a sudden increase in the number of experts and researchers from different fields, who set the ball rolling by conducting research about how we can effectively maximize the use of our time.

As the years pass, the same problem is continuously experienced by humanity and it actually became worst due to the demanding fast-paced lifestyle in this digital age. And now that distractions have become more prominent than ever in history, the challenge of time management has become insurmountable. In this article, I want to share with you three simple steps that I use to effectively manage my time and do the things that I want to do:

1. Create a daily schedule

People often say that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, and this is absolutely true when it comes to time management. By creating a concrete plan, which means putting up things that you want to accomplish within a specific time frame, you can actually get a strong grip of how you want your day to look like. There are a lot of applications out there that you can utilize to create a schedule. I personally use Timetable because of its simplicity and student-friendly functions.

Productivity Tip: As much as possible, please stick on a particular time when accomplishing a specific task. Do not do x at 7:00 AM every Monday and do it at 10:00 AM every Tuesday. This can help you to easily make that action into a habit.

2. Focus and remove distractions

The ability to focus is one of the most significant skills to develop in order to effectively manage time. However, distractions are everywhere and it is both crucial and difficult to remove these stumbling blocks. Personally, I remove these distractions by actively identifying them and writing them on a piece of paper. Once I have done that, the next step is to simply act upon them. I downloaded applications like AppBlock that blocks notifications from my social media accounts or I just simply activate the airplane mode feature of my gadgets. Moreover, it is also advisable if you put your gadgets away from you as you focus on doing your work.

3. Divide your tasks into smaller fragments

We could not agree more to the reality that most often than not, the overwhelming amount of time and effort required to accomplish a task can intimidate us. Hence, we need to adapt a system that can trick our brain towards engaging into a smaller amount of work. Pomodoro Technique is a system that encourages its users to divide their working time into 25 minutes of work, followed by a 5-minutes break. By observing this technique, we can condition our brain to work in a longer period of time resulting to the attainment of the tasks at hand.

As the famous saying goes, time is precious. It is a highly coveted resource that a lot of people long to acquire. However, it is limited and once you have used it—it’s gone forever. Therefore, we are favored to have the privilege of having some in our pockets. And with it, comes a great responsibility of not putting it into waste and making the most out of it.