Beat Deadlines - A Four Step Guide

We all know that time is a crucial part of our day-to-day life, but most of us fail to manage this effectively and end up delaying our deliverables. Here a brief guide to effectively manage time and ensure you never delay the deadlines.

Step 1:

Time is an irreplaceable asset. It is more valuable than money, especially in today’s fast-paced, extremely competitive world.

Step 2:

Time management means planning our time consciously on our day-to-day activities. This will allow us to improve our performance and achieve our desired goals in the stipulated time.

Step 3:

Time management involves both managing our own time and the time of others. Industries today look for employees who can use their time optimally as this helps the organization save money and increase its revenue.

Step 4:

Effective time management skills can have a positive impact on your work and life in general. When you learn to take control of your time daily, you improve your ability to get things done, make better decisions and ultimately gain control of your key priorities.

Advantages of Time Management

Time management is the way you plan and organize your specific tasks and work.

Defeat the Deadlines

To be punctual with our work, we need to assign a fixed amount of time to each task. These time-boxed tasks help our human mind to work according to the deadline, thus managing our workload effectively.

Achieve productivity and efficiency

Effective time management skills make you more productive and skillful. Increased productivity helps us finish our tasks as early as possible without compromising the quality of work.

Decrease in procrastination

“Later, later….LATER”. We keep on delaying our tasks and our workload keeps getting bigger and bigger. If we complete our work in the given time span, we won't fall prey to procrastination. Time management not only means doing more work in less time but also reduces our urge to delay and procrastinate over important tasks.

Boost career and improved opportunities

Fulfilling deadlines and delivering work on time creates a good reputation at your workplace. This attitude could create more opportunities for you and open the doors for promotion.

Opens door for leisure and recreation

Do we remember the last time we made time for ourselves? Most of us don't! Managing our schedule well will give us extra time to pursue our hobbies and enjoy our lives.

Time Management - Is time controlling you?

You will be able to manage your time to a major extent. Read to get a much broader view on the End of the struggle of time management.

Prioritise

Most of us start our day with the most insignificant tasks. Prioritizing our to-do-list helps us manage our time and identify the urgent ones at hand. This will save time and will help us to focus on the work that actually needs to be done.

Multitasking, a boon or a bane?

By multitasking, we try achieving so many things in one go but we end up with nothing in our hands. Instead, we should utilize our time efficiently by taking one thing at a time and accomplishing it before hopping on to the next. Remember the 80/20 rule—80% of your output comes from 20% of your inputs. So rather than wasting your time completing a lot of tasks that yield no value, try doing fewer tasks that hold more value.

Build in buffers

Reward yourself by taking mini breaks to recharge yourself. They can include a short walk, some stretches, meditation, or listening to your favorite music.

Discover your most constructive hours

The best way to get your tasks done efficiently in a specified time frame is to match your highest priority work to your highest productivity hours. If you have a project that demands taking a lot of crucial decisions, set it up in your golden hours.

Eliminate distractions

In our everyday life, distractions like social media, web browsing, and text messages cost us many valuable hours in a day. We need to be aware of such diversions and start taking baby steps to conquer them.

Chalk down a daily plan

At the end of the day, create a list of the most important tasks and schedule them accordingly for the next day. This will get you going as soon as you reach your workplace. Make sure that you pen all of this on paper as it will prevent you from the unnecessary juggling of tasks in your mind.

I hope you got some input, on how to manage your time at the workplace from my articles.

About Author:

Anish Kanodia is a Technical Delivery Head at Chimera Technologies. His hobbies are traveling and he is an avid reader.