Time management is a soft skill that has been discussed more times than I can remember. However, it’s still a skill that’s difficult for people to actually attain.

Let me ask you, how many times do you feel stressed or overwhelmed daily and still end up feeling like you’ve achieved so little?

Well, that’s the consequences of ineffectively managing your time. Balancing work, responsibilities and physical self care can feel like a lot. Therefore, this article will show you simple tips on how to actually manage your time as a busy professional in Nigeria so as to avoid burnout, increase productivity and ultimately have time for your family.

What Is Time Management

Before we delve into the strategies or techniques you can use to effectively manage your time, let’s look at what time management is.

Time management is simply defined as the ability to effectively plan and manage how you use your time in order to stay one step ahead always.
Additionally, time management is important not just in business but in every aspect of life. Let’s look at the benefits of being able to manage your time.

Benefits of Time Management

It’s a bit difficult to manage time effectively, especially with the daily distractions of life. However, there are so many benefits that comes with actually having a strategy for optimizing how you use your time. They include the following.

Productivity at its best

As a busy professional, managing your time properly gives you the ability to tackle many tasks in a given amount of time. This ends up resulting in a higher output and better quality of work. To increase productivity, it is necessary for you to maintain concentration at all costs.

Minimal Stress

Creating a strategy for managing your time helps you to make better business decisions. This ultimately helps to improve your overall well-being, avoid exhaustion, mental fatigue and stress.

Improved work-life balance

Balance is necessary in every aspect of life. Who doesn’t love to have those free days where they actually get to spend quality time with their loved ones or even spend time doing what they love.
As a busy professional, it’s important to strike a balance between work and life.

There are so many more benefits to actually creating a working strategy for your business. Therefore, we will be looking at the strategies you can put in place to avoid burnout and increase productivity.

Effective Time Management Strategies

Most successful businesses in the world have gotten to where they are due to their ability to build a strategy and mange their time effectively.

We’ll be looking at the different strategies you can use to effectively and efficiently manage your time as a Nigerian.

Understand that you’re in control of your time

This might sound funny, but it’s the truth.
As a busy professional with a demanding job or career, the first step to actually managing your time is by realizing that you’re in control of what you do at every point in time.

For instance, if you’re reading this content right now, then that’s because you’re seeking answers on how to properly use your time.

Set clear goals that will help you manage your time

One of the reasons why people feel exhausted and unproductive at the end of the day is because they haven’t really planned out what they want to do with their time.
If your goal for the week is to take a course that will help you get better at your career, then it’s vital you put this goal down. Additionally, it’s necessary to break this goal into small chunks in order to avoid overwhelming yourself.

Create a to-do list

After setting your goals, the next best thing is to create a to-do list. This list contains everything you want to achieve in a day.
A little extra tip—set that goal you want to crush as the highlight of your day.

Doing this not only helps you have a clear plan on the things you want to achieve, it also gives you the momentum you need to crush your daily tasks. You can pen these down in a paper or use an app like the todoist. When you create a to-do list for working, it eliminates confusion, forgetfulness and multitasking.

Prioritize your tasks

Prioritization is the act of putting things of immense importance first before working down to the less important ones. Likewise, when it comes to managing time effectively, this is a strategy that shouldn’t be joked with.

Therefore, when you’re doing creating your to-do list, it’s important to rewrite them in order of priority. This doesn’t only make your to-do list neat but also makes it organized and easy to finish up. However, if you’re using to-do list apps, you can write them down in order of priority.

When you learn to prioritize your most important and urgent tasks first in a day, it gives you room to be productive even if you didn’t round up your whole to-do list.

Delegate tasks

There’s this simple rule when it comes to delegating tasks. It says “Delegate that which you shouldn’t be doing”. What exactly does this mean?

Delegating your tasks is a very good way to empower your colleagues and subordinates. It also helps you free up your time in order to focus on those things that are very important.

Use time blocking for effective time management

After you delegate those tasks and you’re ready to start work, it’s important to use a technique called time blocking to organize your day.

Time blocking is a method that has been used by top business owners to mange their time effectively. Here, you create a calendar plan and allocate specific time to each tasks. This helps you to organize your day and focus on attending to the tasks in your blocks as being very important. However, it is crucial to break down these tasks into smaller chunks so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. You can create a time block for 30 minutes and start moving upwards from there.

Avoid multitasking at all cost

Most times, people believe multitasking is a super power. But the truth is it’s not. Multitasking is a killer of everything time management stands for. We all know the popular saying “you can’t serve two masters at the same time” well, that’s what it’s like when you try to multitask. Therefore, it’s important you focus on one task at a particular time. And try to finish it up within the allotted time.

Minimize distractions

Distractions are bound to come, from family, from friends or even from your team mates at work. However, it’s important to minimize distractions to the barest minimum. One of the best ways to do this is to create a dedicated workspace for yourself. Once you get there, you turn off all notifications, utilize your time block, work from your list and finish up your tasks at each allotted time given to it.

Schedule breaks

Being able to take little breaks in between work is a privilege most busy professionals feel they can’t buy into. However, it’s very important to take up small breaks in between works.
You can use the Pomodoro technique—25 minutes of intense work and 5 minutes doing something you totally love. You repeat this cycle until you’ve maxed out your time.

Use time management productivity apps and tools

Technology has made life easier and better. Use productivity apps and tools to make your work easier, smoother and faster.
Below are few tools you can use to improve your working experience

• Todoist: A task manager and to-do list app that helps you organize tasks, set deadline and prioritize project.
• Trello: An easy to use project management tool that uses boards, lists and cards to organize tasks and track progress. This tool is awesome for tram collaboration as it shows what’s in progress, what’s done and who’s working on what.
• Asana: Another powerful project management tool that helps team members to work together efficiently to track and manage their workflows.

We also have a few time tracking tools like:

• Toggl track: A simple time tracking took that monitors how you spend your time.
• Rescue time: An automatic time tracking app that helps you understand how you spend your time on different apps and websites.

The productivity apps and time tracking tools given above are just but a few to show you how you can streamline your workflow and save up time by using these technologies .
Therefore, check out the different tools available and choose ones that are easy for you to use and helps you manage your work time effectively.

Self care and work-life balance

The main reason for trying to manage your time is to free up time for other things outside work and not just that, but to help you reduce stress effectively.
Therefore, it’s important to take personal life time as serious as you take your work time.

Conclusion

Time management has become an important skill for busy professionals. Balancing work, resposnsibilities, personal life and self care can feel overwhelming. However, with the right strategies, you can take control of your time and increase your productivity. Therefore, go through this article and implement the strategies listed above. But most importantly, track what works for you and adjust accordingly.