The best time management techniques, summarized

At the end of the work day, do you often feel like you’ve hardly made any progress or failed to accomplish your most important tasks? If so, you might benefit from established techniques for managing your time. With the right time management methods, you can better distinguish between important and unimportant tasks, plan your to-dos better, perform tasks more systematically, and achieve results more efficiently.

Time management helps you use your available time as efficiently as possible in order to complete your tasks. But the term “time management” doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter because we can’t actually manage time. We can only manage the way we work. That’s why “self-management” has become an increasingly popular term when it comes to describing how we organize ourselves and use our time.

There are now many different time management methods for prioritizing, planning, performing, and evaluating the effectiveness of your professional and personal tasks.

If you want to manage your time better, it takes a little stamina at first. You should try out different methods and practice each one consistently over several weeks. Some methods will initially create extra work, but will ultimately speed up your workflows dramatically. A time management method has to become a habit before you can really judge whether it works for you. Often, a combination of several methods will be most effective. The process of trying out different techniques can be a little tedious, but it usually proves to be worthwhile.

Mastering time management will benefit you in several ways:

• Greater productivity
• Less stress
• More time for yourself, family, and friends
• Better work-life balance

Below is an overview of the most popular and effective time management methods. You can combine them to develop your own time management techniques.

You should do quadrant 1 tasks immediately, otherwise you may encounter problems. You should schedule quadrant 2 tasks and not neglect them (which can easily happen). Tasks in quadrant 3 should be delegated in order to reduce your workload. You should eliminate quadrant 4 tasks, or if you have no other choice, delegate them. Learn more about how to use the Eisenhower method in our guide.

The Pareto principle states that 20 percent of the work accounts for 80 percent of the results. That means you should prioritize the crucial 20 percent of tasks in your to-do list. Learn more about how to apply the Pareto principle in our guide.

This gives you a guiding principle for further business planning and helps you decide which tasks you need to tackle next. The analysis is more of a preparatory step for time management. Learn more about how to use an ABC analysis in our guide.

A: Define your activities. This involves creating a list of all your to-dos.

L: Estimate the length of time. Get a rough idea of the time it takes to complete each activity in your list. The total planned time gives you an idea of whether you can manage your planned daily workload.

P: Plan buffer time. You should plan only 60 percent of your work time and reserve 40 percent for unexpected events and social activities.

E: Establish prioritized decisions. Decide which task you’ll work on first and which ones you’ll do later in the day. Prioritization techniques and time management methods such as the Eisenhower matrix and the ABC analysis can be useful here.

N: Note your level of success. In the evening, check how successful your planning was and whether you’ve achieved your goals.

By continuously alternating between concentration and rest, your brain is much more able to stay focused and effective over several hours. Learn more about how to use the Pomodoro technique in our guide.

Learn more about how to use SMART criteria in our guide.

If you can’t complete a task within two minutes, put it on a different list such as “Projects”, “Next Actions”, or “Waiting For”. Enter appointments in your calendar. At least once a day, check your lists and decide which tasks you want to work on next. Learn more about Getting Things Done in our guide.

Define timeboxes in which you or your team will focus on completing a task or achieving a result. Timeboxes can span hours, days, or weeks, depending on whether you use the time management method for individual tasks or entire project sprints. For the method to be effective, timeboxes shouldn’t be too long or too short, otherwise they’ll create stress, which impedes good results.

The POSEC method is modeled on the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which a person’s basic needs and duties have more relative importance and therefore create a foundation for their more aspirational desires and goals. Here are the components of POSEC, in order of relative importance:

P: Prioritize. The first thing to do is to decide which goals you want to achieve and then list those goals in order of importance. Accordingly, you should plan on spending the most time on the goals you identify as the most important.

O: Organize. This step involves organizing and planning the recurring obligations and tasks that you have to accomplish in order to achieve the goals you have identified. Having these necessary tasks planned out gives you a sense of stability and security that allows you to move to the next step.

S: Streamline. In this step, you figure out ways to more efficiently fulfill your crucial obligations and duties. When it comes to tasks that you have to do – but don’t necessarily want to do – any time you are able to save can be applied to goals and desires further down your list of priorities.

E: Economize. This step involves budgeting time for the non-essential goals that you would like to achieve. In practical terms, these are the items that are enjoyable or otherwise desirable, but which tend to fall toward the bottom of your list of priorities. Using the efficiencies you have achieved by streamlining, you can budget time to achieve these non-critical goals.

C: Contribute. In this final step, you are able to give back to the group because your own needs have already been fulfilled. In your personal life, this might mean performing some kind of community service or helping someone else achieve their goals. In a work setting, it could mean making suggestions or setting up processes that can help your team or the company as a whole.