How to manage your time effectively and get more done in a day?

All of us struggle at some point in our lives where we find it difficult to manage our time effectively. We fail to balance family and work which in turn makes life stressful and frustrating for ourselves as well as people around us. This creates an unhappy feeling within ourselves and we wish for more hours in a day to get things done or we hope for a lesser amount of work. 

But what if we stop looking for solutions outside and try to change ourselves and prepare ourselves better to handle the limitations of time and work? What if we could get more done in the same amount of time and take out time for personal well being and our loved ones? 

What if at the end of every day we could feel a sense of accomplishment?

Here are a few tricks to get more work done by changing how you manage your time and how you execute your tasks. 

Batch Similar tasks together:

If you are doing tasks which are of similar nature; it is advised to batch them together and finish at once. For example, If you have to reply to emails, manage all those together, at once, and do not check emails throughout the day. 

If you have to make some calls, do them together, one after the other. Do not scatter them throughout the day. You can assign some time slots in a day for this as well. 

If you have to take interviews, maybe do it back to back. If you have to do meetings, do one after the other if the situation allows. 

Batching this will save you from context switching and will be easy on your brain and will increase your focus as well. 

2 Minutes rule: 

Two minutes rule says if you can finish a task in two minute, just do it right away. Do not wait or postpone it. For example, if a colleague has asked you for information, a document or some link to report, and you can send it right away within 2 minutes, just do it right there without waiting for the end of the day or postponing it to some future date. 

If you need to make a decision on something and you can do that in 2 minutes and you do not have to come back to it later; do it right away. 

The advantage of this is that your brain does not need to track these unfinished tasks and it reduces stress a lot. 

Decide 3 victories for the day:

For each day, Plan 3 tasks; which if finished will make your day productive and give you a sense of accomplishment. When you start your day and when your energy is highest, start doing these tasks and do not pick anything else unless these are done. 

Almost all of us generally maintain some sort of todo list to run our day but most of the time our calendar is filled with tasks which generally do not have high return on investment (ROI), they are just fillers which makes us feel busy while at the end of the day we feel we did not accomplish anything meaningful. Therefore pick three most important tasks with high ROI and complete those first. 

Block calendar: 

Always block the calendar for the tasks. Once you start doing this; it will streamline your schedule and will add order to your day. 

Sometimes you have planned your day and a random task comes along and you leave everything planned; to do that new task which derails your daily schedule. Try to avoid these situations. Do not go into crisis management by picking up tasks which are thrown your way. You can always schedule such tasks for future dates if they are not urgent. 

Plan your day a night before: 

Your day does not start in the morning but the night before. Spend 15 mins each night to plan your next day and do a retrospective for the day passed. 

While planning your next day, you can decide your top three priorities for the next day which you would like to complete to make the next day a productive one. You can block time slots on your calendar for specific tasks. You can also do a retrospective each night if your day does not go as planned to find our areas of improvement.

The main advantage of planning your day ahead is that when you wake up in the morning you have your plan ready and you can start at once without thinking about what to do with your day. 

Deep Productive work in time slots:

There is a big difference between being busy and being productive. Most of us are busy all the time while we accomplish nothing. Solution to this is to do deep work without getting distracted. 

Problem with deep work is that the human mind can not remain focused for too long. Also, each person has a different nature and ability to concentrate. Recovery time is also different for each one of us. Therefore no single solution works for everyone. 

Now, how to keep mind focused while providing it time to relax? 

Divide your day into a time slot each for the same duration and waste less and less slots. The time slot may vary for each person. You can divide your day into 3 hours time slots, 1 hour time slots or even 10 minutes time slots according to your liking and after each time slot you can give your brain some time to rest and recover. 

To stop your mind from being distracted in these time slots, you can trick your mind with an Index Card. Keep an index card in front of you and write what you want to achieve in this time slot and whenever you start to get distracted, read this index card and remind yourself what your task at hand is.

Defining Monetary value of time slot:

What if I ask you to take out a 100 dollar bill from your pocket, tear it and throw it in trash? Would you do it? Probably not. Yet most of us throw away our time a lot, on a daily basis; even when we are aware that our time is more precious than a 100 dollar bill. 

Our brain is wired in a way that it cares a lot about monetary loss. You can use this brain hack to improve your productivity. 

Let’s assume you have a 1 hour time slot, put a monetary value on it, for example, 10 dollars, and by the end of each day try to calculate the money you have thrown away by finding how many 1 hour slots you have wasted. The first goal should be to waste less money each day and the second goal should be to increase the monetary value of your time slot from $10 to $15 and then to $20 and so on. 

Also, you can use the same principle to find tasks which you do not have to do. For example, let's say, it takes you 1 hours to wash your clothes but you can outsource it to some laundry guy and get it done for $5 dollars. Why would you spend $10 ( 1 hour ) if this can be done for $5?

This means do not do tasks which are worth less than the monetary value of your time slots, outsource them. 

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