Managing Your Time Effectively

Managing your time effectively is key to ensure you balance you maintain that work-life balance. It can be a difficult one, but it soon becomes a routine.

Here are a few tips on how you can effectively manage your time:

Plan your week

Start each week by setting aside some time to thoroughly plan your days. Plot down any meetings, deadlines, classes you have on, any personal commitments - just get it all down.

This will really allow you to visualize what you have going on each day, and you’ll be able to slot in any extra things that pop in as the week progresses. By planning your week right at the start, you go into each day knowing what you have on and when, and as a result, you spend less time procrastinating, and more time ticking off those to-do’s!

Set Goals

Setting yourself goals each week can really help you manage your time, and give yourself something to work towards. For example, you might want to do 30 minutes of revision a day, go for a daily walk, or just tick off your daily to-do’s.

When setting goals, ensure that you are making them realistic enough to obtain. Check in with how you’re doing halfway through the week, and what you can do to ensure that you’re hitting them.

Pomodoro Technique

Having a lot to do in one day can be tricky, but using a technique such as the Pomodoro technique can really help. It encourages you to work on one task for a particular amount of time. For example, you may want to spend an hour working on each task with a 10 minute break in-between them.

Do what works for you, and experiment with how long you can stay focussed on a particular task for.

Brain Dump

It can be difficult to manage your time effectively when things pop to mind whilst you’re in the process of working on a particular task. Try keeping a piece of paper, or a sticky note to hand. This will allow you to plot down anything that comes to mind so that it’s written down and you don’t forget later, but it’s out of your brain and you can focus at that given time.

Prioritisation

The most important thing you can do in order to manage your time effectively is to prioritise your workload. Have a little think, what’s the most urgent and most time consuming task on your to do list for that day, or perhaps the task you’re least looking forward to completing.

Make a start with that so that it’s out of the way as soon as posible, and then you can focus on the smaler, more manageable tasks and be more in control of your time.

Hopefully these tips can have you managing your time effectively, and smashing those to do’s in no time.