Time is Money! Manage Your Time Properly

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Whether at work or university, learning to manage time is one of the most critical skills, but one that few of us master. In today’s world, we constantly live at an accelerated pace, and often, it becomes impossible to do what we want.

Managing time well yields better results in the various areas of life and allows more free time for rest or leisure, activities of utmost importance for our personal and professional development.

Advantages of managing your time

Proper time management can benefit our work and personal lives. Interview Cracker and Symond Research list several benefits of time management at work, which can apply to other areas. Here are some benefits of good time management:

• It increases productivity: Managing time well allows you to prioritize and delegate activities for the best results.
• It reduces stress: Poor time management commonly leads to a stressful life; procrastinating tasks and not dedicating the necessary time to them can also cause anxiety.
• It balances work and personal life: Dedicating specific time to things and prioritizing activities can keep us from working late, improving our interpersonal relationships.
• It means meeting deadlines: Deliverables can be stressful but do not need to be. Dedicating adequate time to the prioritized activities allows us to meet the established objectives.
• It improves decision-making: Having time to do things and conduct proper research leads to more informed and accurate decisions.
• It improves professional reputation: Meeting the various deadlines and objectives promotes a more professional image of our work.

As you can see, time management brings many advantages, but if it were simple, we would not have so many related problems. How can we obtain these benefits?

Tips and techniques for managing your time

Time management means organizing the time we invest in an activity. However, that does not mean the time invested brings the expected results. Beyond deciding to invest the time in something, it is necessary to do it.

Also, it is essential to consider that routines and structure not only benefit neurotypicals but are also very useful for those with neurodivergence.

The following tips and techniques will help you manage your time efficiently. However, not all of them may be useful to you, as we are all different. We recommend choosing those that fit your personality:

• Eisenhower Matrix: This tool distinguishes the importance and urgency of activities using a quadrant with the legends Important and Urgent, Important but not Urgent, Urgent but Not Important, and Not Important and Not Urgent. In addition, this matrix corresponds to the four priority actions (doing, postponing, delegating, and deleting).

• Pomodoro Technique: This technique involves alternating work sessions with short breaks to encourage concentration and avoid mental fatigue.

• Delegate tasks: It is unnecessary that you perform all the tasks. If someone else can do any of them, delegate them! This allows you to focus on the activities you must accomplish.
• ALPEN Method: This simple technique organizes the day according to a daily plan. It involves incorporating the activities planned for the day and setting aside time for unforeseen events and breaks.

• To-Do List: Making a to-do list by organizing the most important tasks at the top and the least important at the bottom helps you not forget anything valuable.
• Eat-the-frog Method: This involves identifying the most complicated pending task and doing it first to get it out of your mind. This way, you feel that the other tasks are simpler and more enjoyable.
• Avoid multitasking: It has been proven that multitasking harms our cognitive processes, productivity, and mental health.
• Prioritize activities: Identify which tasks are most important and urgent, focus on them, and accomplish them first.
• Evaluate your performance: Self-evaluation always promotes continuous improvement.

If these activities challenge you, various apps will help you organize your time.

Let us get to work!

While the techniques mentioned above involve identifying, prioritizing, and performing activities, many minor differences can be adapted to each person.

Time is money, so it is essential to use it correctly. These techniques and methods are not taught in schools, but they are skills that will help you achieve your goals.

Effective time management increases productivity and contributes to a better quality of life, reducing stress and allowing for a proper work-life balance.

Translated by Daniel Wetta

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0