9 secrets in effective time management
If you have studied at school or university, surely, you can not find any subject associated with " Time management", because no one can master in this field and they cannot teach students by academic knowledge in textbook. All is based on own accumulated experiences in your environment. Depend on different culture, you can build effective time management differently. However, in general, we will reveal 9 secrets to have good time management.
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1. Manage your mail box
"The ability to quickly process and synthesize information and turn it into actions is one of the most emergent skills of the professional world today," says Mann. Therefore, you need to organize them by dividing it into multiple inbox , which one has different filter. For example, if the message is received by another member about internal work , you can move it to the filter "teamwork". If it needs more thought, move it to filter " to-do-list" or "waiting for". Or if it announces meeting, please move to filter " meeting &events".
The key idea in this secret: "Take an action when you see new email as soon as possible".
2. Reply email on schedule:
"It's not effective to read and answer every email as it arrives. Just because someone can contact you immediately does not mean that you have to respond to them immediately," says Dan Markovitz, president of the productivity consulting firm Time Back Management. Thefore, receiving emails and organizing them effectively will increase your productivity in work
3. Decide which is the most important and do it first.
This is a real case study about my manager. When he goes to the office, before he checks his mail box, he spends time to do the most important thing first in his to-do-list. And he still advices his staff " you should organize and think it in the night before, so when you sit down to work, you can already know best what you are doing."
What do you think? It's great idea because of creating the excitement and motivation in that day.
4. Update to-do-list everyday
If you don't know what you should be doing, how can you manage your time to do it? Someone like to write this list out by hand, other people like use software and filter what he/she has done.
Key thing : remember to update it in the early morning and review it in the end of day.
5. Admit multitasking is bad.
"A 20-year-old is less likely to feel overwhelmed by demands to multitask, but young people still have a loss of productivity from multitasking," says Trapani. In reality, if you want to increase your productivity in full capacity, you need to master it. Multitasking decreases everyone's productivity.
6. Know when you work best.
In different people, they have different period of time when they can do well at highest productivity. You can discover it by measuring the productivity in many period of time. Therefore, know when you work best is quite important so that you can manage your schedule to keep your best time free for your most important work.
7. Think about shortcut and keystrokes.
This advice is only for whom work on a computer all day, and their work relates so much on search tool. Keystrokes and shortcut matter will improve your job efficiently.
8. Make it easy to get started.
Before starting project, make sure that everything is clear about information, strategy, or deadline, and all members participating in this project is ready for it. These will make project run easy in the starting time. Moreover, one way to make it easy to get started is manage bookmark service effectively.
9. Dare to be slow.
Remember that a good time manager actually responds to some things more slowly than a bad time manager would. For example, someone who is doing the highest priority task is probably not answering incoming email while they're doing it. As Markovitz writes: "Obviously there are more important tasks than processing email. Intuitively, we all know this. What we need to do now is recognize that processing one's work (evaluating what's come in and how to handle it) and planning one's work are also mission-critical tasks."
