What Are the Secrets to Successful Time Management?

With hard work, anything can be done. However, you have to keep in mind that you need to accompany hard work with proper time management for you to become really effective in what you do. Working hard blindly would just lead to waste of energy and ineffective task division. You need to learn to manage your time to ensure that you do things right and submit work on time.

Prioritize

Successful time management involves learning to prioritize. To rank your tasks according to importance is to allow yourself to work on the things that you need to finish on time. If you have a huge task to do, you should learn to divide it into subsections. Instead of thinking of one huge step to take, try accomplishing one small step at a time. This notion will make the task seems a little easier and definitely doable. Once you know your priorities and taken the first step to accomplish them, you will be on a roll and will finish your tasks on a shorter period of time.

Orderliness

Learning to prioritize is not that hard but practicing orderliness is a mean task. It is not easy for most people to be actually organized. Most people have this thinking of "Hey, I may be messy at work but at least, I do the job". But what do they don't realize is that yes, they are able to finish their tasks but they are not working their full potential, therefore being inefficient at some point.

To be orderly and perform successful time management, one needs to actually plan. You can plan effectively by having a daily planner. There are a lot of tools that you can use for daily planning. There's the usual pen and paper. But if you think you will be more efficient with your smart phone then feel free to use it. However, traditional as it may sound, pen and paper combination is still the most reliable especially when your phone ran out of battery. Pen and paper can put in your packet so it'll be handy all the time.

To achieve orderliness in your schedule you must be systematic. Having a planner will do this job for you because you will develop the habit of jotting down important things such as deadlines and office meetings. This will lessen your tendency to forget so you would not miss a task.

Other than a daily planner, you could also use sticky notes. These are cheap and handy. The purpose of sticky notes is to be a constant reminder of your things to do. Sticky notes can be put on spots you happen to lay your eyes on the most so you are always being reminded of work. Once you are done with the task, all you have to do is take off the note and throw it away.

Rewards

That act of throwing your sticky notes is especially beneficial because it gives the person a sense of fulfillment. Retrieving sticky notes from wherever you posted them represents finishing your tasks. Another secret to successful time management is giving occasional rewards to yourself. Treat yourself after a day of hard work. As trivial as Facebook's application games will do.