6 Easy Strategies to Better Manage Time

While there are dozens of strategies to more efficiently manage your time, here are six proven ones.

1. Use a calendar. Regardless of the format (paper, electronic, etc.), get in the habit of properly maintaining and referring to your calendar. Electronic calendars can send automatic reminders so that you don’t miss an important event.

2. Anticipate deadlines. Look ahead at looming deadlines for big projects like budget proposals and block off time to do that necessary work. Help your team members be more successful by noting on your calendar when you will be requesting information and sending them reminders. Don’t let deadlines creep up on you.

3. Keep meetings short. People have tendencies to fill up all of the available meeting time (and then some). Keeping meetings purposely short requires the participants to focus on what really needs to get done. State the meeting goals at the beginning and keep the discussion on track.

4. Use a to-do list. A journalist asked a good friend who is one of the leading memory psychologists for the best time to improve your memory. His response: “Don’t rely on it. Make lists.” Having a to-do list readily available allows you to use unexpected free time to get some tasks done. This also helps your efficiency as nothing important will get overlooked.

5. Use shortcuts. Figure out strategies to cut back on wasted time. For example, preparing cut-and-paste templates for email responses will save time so that you don’t have to write the same email messages repeatedly.

6. Keep a notebook. You likely won’t remember all the good ideas that pop up, nor the important things you are told during the day. Keep a notebook handy (electronic or old school) for writing those down for later review. It saves time searching for those good ideas or asking colleagues, “What was that again?”

It is important to remember that there are individual differences and preferences when it comes to time management. Some people work well in long blocks of time. Others need to intersperse working time with short breaks. Try different time management techniques to find out what works best for you. It will pay dividends.

When it comes to effective time management, the biggest issue is self-discipline, so find out what works for you and stick to those time-saving techniques.