What are the methods of time management?

Time management refers to the judicious use of time for achieving success in life. Time Management helps an individual to make the best possible use of time. It is essential for individuals to value time and allocate the right time to the right activity.

• Set your Priorities. Know what all needs to be done on an urgent basis. Prepare a “TO DO” List or a “Task Plan” to jot down tasks you need to complete against the time slot assigned to each activity. High Priority Tasks must be written on top followed by tasks which can be done a little later. Make sure you stick to your Task List.
• Make sure you finish your assignments within the stipulated time frame. Tick the tasks you have already finished. Treat yourself with a chocolate if you finish your assignments ahead of deadlines.
• Understand the difference between urgent and important work. Manage your work well. Do not begin your day with something which is not so important and can be done a little later. First finish off what all is urgent and important. Do not wait for your Boss’s reminders.
• Stay focused. Do not leave your work station if some urgent work needs to be done. Going for strolls in the middle of an urgent work breaks continuity and an individual tends to loose his focus. Individuals who kill time at work find it difficult to survive workplace stress.
• Do include time for your tea breaks, net surfing, personal calls and so on in your daily schedule. It is important. Human being is not a machine who can work at a stretch for eight to nine hours. Assign half an hour to fourty five minutes to check updates on social networking sites, call your friends or family or go for smoke breaks etc.
• Set realistic and achievable targets for yourself. Know what you need to achieve and in what duration? Do not lie to yourself. Assigning one hour to a task which you yourself know would require much more time does not make sense.
• Do not overburden yourself. Say a firm no to your boss if you feel you would not be able to complete a certain assignment within the assigned deadline. Don’t worry, he will not feel bad. Probably he can assign the same to any of your fellow workers. Accept tasks which you are really confident about.
• Be disciplined and punctual. Avoid taking unnecessary leaves from work unless there is an emergency. Reach work on time as it helps you to plan your day better.
• Keep things at their proper places. Files must be kept at their respective drawers. Staple important documents and put them in a proper folder. Learn to be a little more organized. It will save your time which goes on unnecessary searching.
• Do not treat your organization as a mere source of money. Change your attitude. Avoid playing games on computer or cell phones during office hours. It is unprofessional. Do not work only when your boss is around. Taking ownership of work pays you in the long run.
• Develop the habit of using an organizer. It helps you plan things better. Keep a notepad and a pen handy. Do not write contact numbers or email ids on loose papers. You will waste half of your time searching them. Manage your emails. Create separate folders for each client. Do not clutter your desktop.

There are more than 50 time management techniques out there, for all the different personality characters, productivity issues and business needs. 

We gathered all the time management techniques in one place. Even more, we did a little bit of research on all of them and prepared a selection of the 10 best ones. 

Some of the best time management techniques are really simple and straightforward, others a little bit complex, but all of them can actually be easily implemented into daily practice. 

We decided to provide you with:

• a detailed description of the 10 most useful time management techniques, but if you don’t find any of them the right fit for you, 
• we added a comprehensive list of all other time management strategies we found out there with a short description and a link to more information, if available.

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Which technique is the best to help you manage your time better?

Based on our research, testing and opinions of productivity experts, here are the best time management techniques you need to know:

The list of all other time management techniques (48 techniques) out there.

Now let's dive deep in each one of them.

1. SMART Goals

Proper time management always start with setting goals and knowing in which direction you want to go in life. One of the most popular goal-setting techniques is called SMART goals. 

The technique has been here since 1981 when the paper entitled “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives” was published by George T. Doran.

The idea is pretty simple. Every SMART written goal should be written down following the next criteria:

• Specific – clearly defined desired outcome, what you want to achieve
• Measurable – there must be away to measure progress
• Achievable – the goal can be met with available resources
• Relevant – it must fit a bigger picture and you must know why you want to achieve something
• Time-bound – a clear deadline for when the goal will be achieved

Most people don’t set goals. Only around 10% of people have written goals. That means it takes effort, with some real reflection and thinking to write down meaningful goals in the right way. 

So, if you decide to write down your goals, you don’t want to write vague resolutions that won’t give you a sense of direction and proper motivation. It would be an exercise in vain. You want to write down your goals in a smart way.

You can find many detailed descriptions on how to set SMART goals, practical examples and templates on the internet.

Read more: SMART Goals: Increase your chances of success

2. The Eisenhower Matrix / The Eisenhower box

Once you have your goals written in a SMART way, you should break them down in concrete and actionable tasks. Then the tasks need to be prioritized. The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the most popular frameworks for prioritizing tasks. 

As an interesting fact, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, serving between the years 1953 and 1961. His matrix recommends arranging tasks in one of the four quadrants:

1. Urgent + Important (Do first)
2. Not Urgent + Important (Schedule)
3. Urgent + Not Important(Delegate)
4. Not Important + Not Urgent (Eliminate)

Urgent tasks are the ones that you feel you must react to (like emails, phone calls, meetings etc.) and tasks that are time‑sensitive to finish, meaning you have strict deadlines. 

Important tasks, on the other hand, are the ones that contribute to your long-term goals and things you really want to do in life. Important tasks are the ones that are part of your business or life vision and mission.

Of course, you should always tackle urgent and important tasks. It’s important that you spend most of your working time in this quadrant (urgent + important). 

The important but not urgent tasks, like sports, learning, creating, bonding with people, you should schedule in your calendar(and make sure you do them regularly). All other tasks you should delegate or simply delete. 

This method is also often used by recruiters.

Read more: The Eisenhower matrix – A popular prioritization framework

3. Kanban Board

Kanban is a Japanese word meaning a billboard or signboard. The main idea of the Kanban board is to have a visual board that helps you to track progress on your goals. 

People who are fans of Kanban usually use a big dry‑wipe whiteboard to visualize their goals or software that supports Kanban visualization. In our experience, a physical Kanban board works much better.

You should draw several columns on the whiteboard, visualizing the stage of each specific task. The columns on the blackboard are usually:

Then you need sticky notes. Every sticky note represents a task that needs to be completed. You simply write the name of the task that needs to be completed. You can use different colors of sticky notes for different types of tasks. 

After you have the big board and sticky notes with tasks, you simply stick the notes in one of the columns, depending on the phase the task is in.If you followed all the steps, you should have a nice visual representation of your tasks and in which stage they are. Based on your progress, you move sticky notes through these columns.

Software that supports the Kanban method:

• Trello
• KanbanFlow‍
• Kanbanize
• Kanban Tool

Read more: Kanban Board – The number one productivity tool for visualizing tasks

4. Do Deep Work / Avoid Half-Work or Shallow Work

If you employ all the previously mentioned techniques, you should have your goals clearly written down, broken down in concrete and actionable tasks, and properly prioritized and visualized on a Kanban board. 

Now you should be able to easily select the most important task to work on. To successfully complete the task in the most productive way possible, “deep work” comes into play.

Deep work is a term developed by Cal Newport, stating that all intellectual activities should be performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. 

Only when you do deep work can you can create new value, improve your skills, and do things that are hard to replicate. Many people call this psychological state that enables you to do deep work “flow”.

The opposite of deep work is “half-work” or “shallow work”. That kind of low‑value work usually goes along with multitasking, working on many projects and having many distractions in the environment (email, telephone, chat and other interruptions). 

The best way to overcome “half-work” is by focusing for a significant amount of time on one thing and eliminate everything else, every single distraction.

Software that can help you do deep work:

Read more: Deep work – the only way to create high-value outputs

5. The Pomodoro Technique

When you do deep work, you should never forget to take breaks. Tomatoes can remind you to take your breaks. 

The Pomodoro (Tomato) Technique is a very popular method of managing your time, invented by the software developer and author Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980's. Today, Pomodoro is one of the most popular time management techniques out there.

The idea of Pomodoro is very simple. You should break down your daily work and complete it in intervals separated by short breaks. You work for 25 minutes straight, which is called one Pomodoro, and then take a 3 – 5 minutes break. After 4 Pomodori, you take a longer break of 15 – 30 minutes to recharge. 

You should use a simple timer to follow the Pomodoro Technique. Following the technique should give you enough focus and recovery time to maximize your productivity.

Here is a summary of the six Pomodoro steps:

1. Decide on a task to be done
2. Set the pomodoro timer
3. Work on the task
4. End work when the timer rings after 25 minutes (one Pomodoro)
5. If you have fewer than four Pomodori, take a short break (3–5 minutes)
6. After 4 Pomodori, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), then go back to step 1

And here are a few useful Pomodoro timers:

• Pomodoro Tracker
• Tomighty
• Tomato Timer
• Pomotodo
• PomoDoneApp

The Flowtime Technique - A more flexible Pomodoro Technique – There’s one interesting variation of the traditional Pomodoro Technique called The Flowtime Technique. The name comes from the term “flow”, which is when you do deep work and become completely focused and immersed in a task.

The main idea of the flowtime technique is that you set a specific time period (usually between 10-90 minutes) and use it as an experimental time frame to see how long you can work in focus and when you need a break. 

Simply, when you cannot focus any more and work in the flow, you take a break. At the same time, you keep a record with an input of your start time, end time, break time, work time, and whether or not you were interrupted.

6. Track how you spend your time

We might be biased here at Spica when it comes to time tracking, since we have developed the most simple and useful time tracker called MyHours, but we have often seen what time tracking does to productivity of individuals and teams. 

A good time tracker gently pushes you to be more productive, enables you to analyze how you spend your time, and on top of that, you can automate things like reporting and invoicing.

As the saying goes, you can only manage what you measure. By employing time tracking, you have a clear picture of how you spend your time, how much you work on different projects, and how much you really earned. 

With accurate statistics you can optimize your time better. If you use a time tracker, you will also be more prone to consistently using other time management techniques.

If you are interested more in time tracking please read our following articles:

And now let’s add more complex, but very popular, time management techniques to the list. They are kind of time management systems on their own.

7. GTD - Getting things done

Getting things done is one of the most popular comprehensive time management frameworks out there. It’s a five-step method that helps you to break bigger tasks into smaller manageable steps and then to finish do those small steps immediately. 

The tagline for the framework is “the art of stress-free productivity”. Using the system should help you to be more relaxed at work, accomplish more, be more creative and keep track of all the relevant things.Here are the five steps the framework is based on:

• Capture – First you capture everything that comes to your mind, every idea, task or anything else that is worth remembering (things to read, watch, notes, bills etc.). You capture everything in the inbox, to unload your mind. But the important thing is to empty the inbox regularly.
• Process – After you capture all the things, the second thing is to analyze them and decide what to do with every specific item. If the item is not actionable, you have to decide to either delete it, archive it or delay it. If the item is actionable, you have to decide to either do it, delegate it or defer it. If it takes less than 2 minutes, you should do it immediately.
• Organize – After processing, the next step is to organize items and actions. When organizing, you should do at least four things. Put items on four main action lists (projects, next action, waiting for, calendar), file tasks under different labels and also provide them with context. Non-actionable items should be stored in a digital or paper-based archive.
• Reviewing – The goal of reflecting is to make sure everything is up to date. When reviewing, you should update your lists, remove irrelevant items etc. You should do at least a weekly review.
• Engage – The final step after capturing and identifying actionable items, properly filing them and reviewing your tasks, you should start working on the selected tasks. Before engaging, you should make sure you have the right context for the tasks (context is what you need to be able to carry out an action, it can be a place, a tool or a person),enough time and energy, and that the tasks have the highest priority.

Software that supports the GTD time management system:

• nTask
• FacileThings
• Todoist
• Nirvana
• Flow-E

8. OKR - Objectives and key results

OKR is a very popular framework, especially in business, since it’s used by companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Uber and Intel (the father of OKR is Andy Groove, the famous CEO of Intel). The framework is quite simple. 

Objectives are goals, key results indicate how you will get there. To set OKRs, you can help yourself with the formula: I will (Objective) as measured by (this set of Key Results).

• Objectives are descriptions of what you want to achieve. They should be short, inspirational and engaging. An organization should have 3 to 5 high level objectives.
• Key Results are metrics of how you measure your progress towards your objectives. There should be a set of 3 to 5 key results per objective. When you look at the key results at the end, you should have a clear idea of whether you accomplished the objective.

OKRs should be a part of the quarterly planning process and, once defined, they should be communicated to all the team members. It’s important that OKRs are frequently set, tracked and reviewed. You can find many different examples and templates for OKRs. Software that supports OKR:

• Weekdone
• Perdoo
• Workfront
• 15Five
• 7Geese

9. SCRUM - the most popular agile management framework

SCRUM is the most popular agile productivity framework, especially in software development. It’s not exactly a time management strategy per se, but it can definitely help with properly addressing productivity issues and staying focused. 

The cornerstone of the framework is that you have to stay flexible and regular adapt to changing circumstances. Next to that, you learn the most not when you plan, but rather when you execute, so you must consistently update your plans based on new feedback in the execution phase.

SCRUM gives a lot of emphasis on relationships in teams, creating a valuable outcome, collaboration with all stakeholders, responding to change, and constantly improving the way you do work. 

It also provides a clear set of tools for implementing the framework. It’s more of a team‑based than person‑based technique, but it can definitely be adapted and used on a personal level.

The roles in SCRUM team are:

• Product owner – Manages priorities, talks to all stakeholders, takes care of products
• SCRUM master – Facilitates the SCRUM framework, removes obstacles
• The team – Cross-factual, fully committed team

The workflow is based on:

• Sprint Planning – Defining the scope of work for the next 2 – 4 weeks
• Daily Scrum – Short 15‑minute daily meetings to keep commitment among peers
• Sprint Review – Review of the work completed after the sprint
• Sprint Retrospective – A discussion of what went well and what could be improved

And the artifacts of SCRUM are:

• Product Backlog – A list of everything that will be delivered
• Sprint Backlog – A list of tasks that will be delivered in the next sprint
• User Stories – Small, independent, valuable, estimable, testable delivery features
• Burn-down Chart (Total effort, Velocity) – Progress plan based on the actual capability of the team

Project management software that supports SCRUM or similar agile principles:

• Backlog
• Zoho
• Jira
• VivifyScrum

Read more: Scrum Guide: Master Scrum in just 15 minutes

10. BoJo - The bullet journal

The Pomodoro technique and The Bullet Journal Method are the most frequently searched for time management techniques for work in search engines. That’s why a bullet journal must definitely be among the top 10 time management techniques. 

The tagline for BoJo is “to help you track the past, organize the present, and plan for the future”. And all you need are a notebook and a pen.

The core principles of the method are that you can’t make time, you can only take time, happiness is the byproduct of meaning, you should cultivate curiosity through goals, do small changes that lead to big changes over time, and look inward to reveal a way forward.

The key components of BoJo are:

• Index page, for which you need to number the pages
• Three different main collections of logs: (Daily log of tasks, events, and notes; Monthly log consisting of a calendar and a to-do list; Future log to list all the long-term goals and commitments)
• Other different collections, namely groups of related ideas (lists, logs, notes, trackers, mind maps, plans, sketches)

In your logs, you should do rapid logging. You should write things down in short notations. For logging, you should use a different type of bullet points and signifiers to add context. 

Every month, you also do a review and migration of tasks from one log to another (you do things like crossing out irrelevant tasks, you schedule new tasks, migrate tasks from daily logs to a new monthly log etc.).

The list of all other time management tips and techniques

If you don’t like any of the 10 time management techniques described above, don’t worry. There are many other options. Explore the list below and we’re sure you’ll find the right time management technique for you.

1-3-5 Rule

Every working day, you can accomplish only 1 big task, 3 medium tasks, and 5 small tasks. Plan accordingly.

168 Hours

‍There are 168 hours in a week, which means there is more than enough time to do all the important things.

10 Minutes

Sit down, commit 10 minutes of effort to a selected task and after 10 minutes, you can stop if you want. Usually you won’t.

10 Minute Task

Every single task on your to-do list should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. If it does, you need to break it down.

18 Minutes

Start your day by spending 5 minutes on going over your daily schedule. Take a 1-minute break every hour to see your progress and what’s left to be done. End your day with a 5-minute review.

90 Minute Focus Session

‍Work 90 minutes in complete focus without any distractions and then rest for 20 – 30 minutes.

4D system 

‍Before performing any task, make a conscious decision: Delete, Delegate, Do now or Defer.

52 / 17

‍Work in complete focus for 52 minutes straight and then take a 17-minute break.

7 Minute Life

Spend 7 minutes in the morning to plan your day and 7 minutes before you go to sleep to review your day and prepare the plan for tomorrow.

ABCDE

You divide the tasks into the following categories:

• A: The most important task
• B: Less important tasks
• C: Tasks with no consequences
• D: Delegate
• E: Eliminate

Agile Results‍

Focus on the three key results that you want to achieve over a certain period of time: day, week, month or year.

Autofocus

Use four different lists: New tasks, recurring tasks, unfinished and old tasks. Start with new tasks, move on to recurring tasks, then spend some time on the unfinished tasks. At the end, clear some old tasks.

Batching

Batch similar tasks and meetings together. You will complete your work faster and minimize idle time.