How to Manage Time and Prioritize Tasks in 7 Steps
Time is one of the most valuable assets in life, and it’s what most people waste. No matter what you do in life, you only get 24 hours each day. It’s not how you spend these 24 hours that defines you, but how you manage to spend these 24 hours every day.
Highly successful people, no matter how different their careers are, have one thing in common, and it’s the power of time management.
Being able to manage your time effectively can make you manage yourself better.
Benefits of time management:
1. Improve your productivity
How you manage your time affects your productivity. Poor time management decreases your productivity, while better time management does the opposite.
2. Decreases stress and anxiety
When you have many tasks in a day, you are more likely to be stressed by all these tasks. The best solution isn’t multitasking, but managing your time in a smart way that you complete as many tasks as you can.
It also avoids the risk of being overwhelmed by too many tasks you can’t finish, which causes anxiety.
3. Gives your life a balance
Finding the balance between work-life, family life, and personal life is really hard. Giving each the time it deserves will give balance to your life and solve many problems in your life.
There are a lot of time management benefits in our life which may need another article.
Prioritizing tasks is an important skill needed for effective time management. You can’t manage your time effectively if you don’t prioritize your tasks.
Time management is all about arranging prioritized tasks, giving each the time and attention it deserves, to achieve high productivity, reduce stress, and complete tasks.
How to manage time and prioritize task effectively in 7 steps
In this blog post, I’ve covered all the steps you need to learn how to manage time. It includes how to prioritize tasks the right way.
Here are the 7 steps to learn how to manage time:
Step 1: Prioritize
Most people waste their time without knowing it.
Sometimes you waste your time doing the easy unimportant task to trick yourself into thinking you are working on a task rather than working on that boring important task.
To master time management in your life, you have to know how to prioritize everything you spend your time on.
Everything you spend your time on, prioritize it into a four-time quadrant.
1. Important and urgent: These are important tasks that require your full attention. Examples:
- Crisis
- Pressing problems
- Emergencies
- Deadlines.
2. Not urgent but important: These are important tasks that don’t need your attention at the moment. You can schedule them. Examples:
- Personal growth
- Exercise, planning
- Building relationships
- Learning
3. Urgent but not important: It includes all the distractions we get when working on a boring task. Examples:
- Unimportant phone calls, notifications, and emails.
- Unnecessary meetings
- Needless interruption
- Other people’s minor issues
These tasks always pop up from nowhere and try to grab your attention. We all hate pop-up ads, but our minds like unimportant easy pop-up tasks.
When stuck in a monotonous task, your mind gets bored and searches for ways to get you off that task.
Unimportant and urgent tasks are the best solutions to get you off your way. Don’t give your attention to these things and always ignore them like we ignore pop-up ads.
4. Not urgent and not important: Our mind loves this quadrant because it’s easy and doesn’t require any effort. Examples:
- Some calls, notifications, and notifications.
- Busy work
- Trivial activities
These are things you need to remove from your life.
Always prioritize your tasks to avoid distractions and increase your productivity.
Step 2: Arrange your tasks
Prioritizing your work can give the right arrangement to all your tasks without the need to look at it again. But sometimes you may face the problem of having more than two important and urgent tasks.
That’s where you don’t prioritize things. You arrange these tasks according to their degree. If your day is full of tasks that are urgent and important.
See if the degree of the task is high, medium, or low. These will give you a clear starting point and why you should start with a certain task.
When you have arranged the tasks you will work on in your day, go to step 3.
Step 3: Set goals
When you don’t have a goal that you are committed to. You will waste your time and easily get distracted.
Lack of goals comes from ignoring things that are important but not urgent and staying in the comfort zone. But if you are on a mission or have something you are committed to.
Set goals. Setting goals motivates you. Shows you the endpoint to where you are heading. It enriches your vision and keeps your mind fixed on that goal.
Reminding yourself that you have a goal to achieve prevents your mind from being easily distracted.
Step 4: Plan
Planning is an important skill needed for managing time and completing tasks.
Setting goals shows you the endpoint. Planning gives you the steps you have to take to reach that goal.
When you have a plan, you give it the time needed. You don’t waste your time on tasks that are unimportant and not urgent.
Step 5: Manage time wasters and accelerators
In our present time, there are a lot of time wasters and accelerators that can waste your time and distract you.
Most of the social media apps are time wasters and accelerators.
- Facebook: It kills time and makes you an addict.
- Instagram: some of the content is great and beneficial, but most are useless.
- Tik Tok: 2 or 3 hours of your day can pass without you benefiting anything and it feels like 30 minutes.
These apps are fun and a great way to communicate with others, but most are urgent and unimportant tasks. Manage the time you spend on these apps.
Steps 6: Focus
After setting goals and planning how to achieve that goal. It’s time to give that goal your focus, to get it done. You will be distracted by your phone messages and emails.
Your thoughts, while studying or learning something new. These distractions are always urgent but not important, so focus on what’s important.
Step 7: Complete the task
The last step in managing time, yet the hardest one. Most people start but don’t finish.
It takes faith, self-belief, consistency, learning through the journey, smart and hard work to achieve a big goal. That’s why it’s one of the greatest things that lets you recognize your self-worth and time.
Don’t let unimportant urgent things stop you from completing and waste your time.
Also, read: 4 Powerful Tips To Improve Focus
