Best Time Management Skills That Help In Avoiding Procrastination

Every human being has experienced being late for something. Whether you are late for a bus or a train ride, or you are unable to manage your time properly and thus stay up all night preparing for an exam. These things happen to all of us, but why? Well, you could say that it is because of procrastination, which would be partially correct. However, there is one thing even more harmful than procrastination, which is a lack of time management skills. Now, if we are being serious, not everyone is born with excellent time management abilities. We are all humans; we aren’t perfect. But you need to keep in mind that time management techniques are skills that you can attain with practice. Yes, in this blog, we will learn about some of the best time management skills that will help you manage time effectively and avoid procrastination.

What Exactly Are Time Management Techniques?

You must have heard the term ‘time management techniques’ millions of times; however, some confusion regarding the term needs to be cleared up. To begin with, time management techniques are structured methods and systems that can help you in time organization, task prioritization, and enable you to work more efficiently. Mastering these techniques gives you greater control over yourself and allows you to master the skill termed ‘avoiding procrastination.’

Some people often confuse the term ‘time management techniques’ with ‘time management skills’ and ‘time management strategies.’ Time management skills refer to the personal abilities you develop over time, whereas time management techniques are actionable systems that you apply to further optimize your skills. Time management strategies, on the other hand, refer to the overarching plans you develop to manage your time over a longer period.

Why Do Time Management Skills Matter?

Skills that allow you to manage time effectively are essential requirements for any human. You don't have to be an incredibly busy person to learn time management skills. These skills are beneficial to all of us. Here are some of the baseline reasons why skills for time management are important to each of us.

Reduces Stress and Anxiety

Time management is essential if you want to practice stress management and reduce your anxiety. Most often, students and professionals suffer from heavy stress just because they can’t manage their time properly.

Boosts Productivity and Efficiency

If you can manage time effectively, then you automatically will have more time to enhance your productivity and precision. Time management and perfectionism go hand in hand; one complements the other, and you just have to practice them in tandem.

Enables You To Achieve Goals

Most goals are time-bound, which is why your time management skills need to be up to the mark. If you can balance time reasonably with each of your goals, then it’s a guarantee that you will complete your goal on time.

Improves Your Quality Of Life

As discussed earlier, time management is important in all aspects of life, not just your professional life. A person who is skilled at time management is likely to have a better quality of life.

Builds Self-Discipline

Most importantly, time management skills will help you build self-discipline, even though self-discipline is essential in building time management skills. You can say that both skills go hand in hand.

Top 12 Key Time Management Skills With Examples

Now, there are 12 time management skills that are considered to be some of the most effective habits to integrate into your lifestyle. We will look at these skills one by one and see how each of them can help you become a more productive and punctual person in all aspects of your life.

1 Prioritization

Prioritization refers to the act of arranging tasks in order of importance and urgency. The Eisenhower matrix is a very efficient way of mapping the urgency and significance of a task, and we will learn about it later.

2 Goal Setting (SMART goals, KPIs)

Time management is only possible when you have a clear direction. By setting goals according to the SMART acronym (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound), you can reliably measure the time it takes you to achieve your goals and plan your time management strategies accordingly.

3 Scheduling and Planning

This is the act of organizing your tasks with a scheduler or planner. You can also use AI-powered task management tools to make scheduling and planning easier for yourself.

4 Delegation and Outsourcing

 One thing you have to keep in mind is that you don’t have to do everything by yourself. You can delegate your task to someone else who is willing to do outsourcing work and save your time for the most important responsibilities.

5 Time Blocking/Deep Work

Time blocking is a schedule-based activity that requires you to delegate blocks of time to specific tasks in your day. The key objective here is to create a focused, distraction-free environment for deep work.

6 Task Management Tools and Apps

 Nowadays, you can very easily use task management tools to plan your schedule and set reminders. It can take a while getting used to, but it is definitely a helpful way you can employ in avoiding procrastination.

7 Avoiding Procrastination

 Never put off tasks that you have at hand. Only do so when the task at hand is not urgent, but if it is, leave everything behind and solely focus on it.

8 Focus, Concentration, and Mindfulness

These are mental skills you have to develop if you want to simultaneously develop your time management skills. Focus and concentration allow you to stay away from distractions and concentrate all your time on one task only.

9 Organization (Digital+Physical)

Organization isn’t necessarily about having a tidy desk or workbench. It also refers to how organized your systems are, which helps you manage your time more effectively.

10 Stress and Energy Management

Stress is often something you will face while working too hard with short deadlines. However, stress does nothing but drain your energy, which is very inefficient if you want to manage time effectively.

11 Adaptability and Flexibility

Time management strategies can go awry in certain situations, thanks to unforeseen circumstances; that’s where your adaptability chimes in. If your plans are good and flexible, you can just about fix any plan into any schedule, and your work will be completed on time.

12 Self-Discipline and Accountability

 Lastly, you must learn to discipline yourself and stay true to yourself while improving your time management skills. Also, learn to take accountability for your mistakes and focus on being better rather than blaming others for your errors.

How To Use Your Time Effectively (Scientifically-Proven Strategies)

What we discussed just now were some of the most effective strategies that can help you manage time, but how do you do that exactly? Well, that is what we are trying to find the answer to in this section. Let us see how managing time effectively can be made easier with these scientifically proven time management strategies.

Do a Time Audit

A time audit involves tracking every minute of your day for a short period of time (usually a week or two). This will give you first-hand information about how you spend your time, and it will allow you to make the necessary adjustments for future changes.

Eisenhower Matrix

This technique was developed by General and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It classifies tasks into four categories: Urgent and Important (do it now), Important and Not Urgent (schedule it for later), Urgent and Not Important (delegate to someone), and Not Urgent and Not Important (eliminate from schedule).

Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle is one of the most important efficiency strategies of all time. Widely known as the 80/20 rule, it suggests that your 80% results come from your 20% efforts. The main job is to identify the 20% tasks that will give you the highest return on your time investment.

Eat that Frog

 This principle, coined by author Brian Tracy, suggests that the ‘frog’ is your biggest task. And the ‘frog’ is also the task that you are most likely to procrastinate on. You have to eat the frog the first thing in the morning and save yourself the hassle that arises from last-minute rushes.

Pomodoro Technique

 This technique suggests that you break down your work into 25-minute intervals separated by short breaks of about 5 minutes or so. These timed gaps will allow you to enforce a sense of urgency in your work.

Digital Tools and AI Assistants for Scheduling

You can use task management tools to automate scheduling and set reminders. You can also analyze your habits and set specific times for specific tasks. 

Turn these into daily habits

Lastly, what good are these time management strategies if you don’t apply them on a regular basis? You just have to use them regularly, and you will excel at time management in a relatively short period of time.

How To Showcase Time Management Skills In A Resume?

Every recruiter in every company likes a candidate whose resume showcases ‘time management’ as a skill. However, the skill is useless if you can’t back it up. Here is how you can display your skills in time management in your resume.

In your professional summary or objective

In your basic portfolio, you must avoid making the mistake of using cliché statements like “I am good at managing my time.” Instead, it is highly recommended that you use actionable sentences such as “Dedicated professional with strong time management skills.”

In the ‘work experience’ section

In your work experience section, you can highlight instances from your experience that showcase that you are actually capable of managing time effectively. For example, instead of saying something like, “Prioritized daily tasks,” you can say something like, “I managed and prioritized a daily workload of 20+ supporting tickets, reducing average resolution time by 15%.” 

Common Mistakes That Slow You Down At Work (And Fixes)

Even if you consider yourself to be a skilled time management specialist, but find yourself unable to manage your time effectively, there could be some underlying causes. These would be some mistakes that people often make that slow them down considerably at work. Here are some of these mistakes that chew away at your time management skills, and how to fix them.

Multitasking

 It is a common myth that multitasking is a helpful way to manage your time, which is absolutely not true. By doing so, you are only distracting yourself from one main task with the other.

Not Taking Breaks

Taking breaks is not only important for your mental health, but also for your physical health. Not taking breaks doesn’t make you a fast worker; it makes you someone who has little regard for your own well-being.

Procrastinating on Difficult Tasks

If a task seems difficult, it is all the more important that you focus your attention on that task only. If you have an easy assignment at hand, you can delegate it to someone else so that they can write my assignment for me. However, if the task is difficult and more important, then it demands your full attention.

Failing to Set Boundaries

Setting boundaries gives you a much-needed breathing room between yourself and your responsibilities. If you look at some effective time management examples, you’ll see how boundaries helped people more instead of restricting them.

Having an Unorganized Workplace

This is more of a meta suggestion, but it is important because a tidy workplace is less distracting than an unorganized one. Thus, if your workplace isn’t clean, clean it now, and you’ll see your concentration improve drastically.

Case Studies and Real-World Time Management Examples

Perhaps the best way to learn about time management is to look at some realistic examples of people applying time management skills in their day-to-day lives. Let us look at some of these time management examples, and hopefully, we will learn something from them.

The College Student

Let’s say that there is a college student who has a research paper due in three days. Even though the paper is only 10 pages long, the amount of work it requires is too massive to finish within three days. To counter this issue, he uses the Pomodoro technique by working at focused 25-minute intervals while taking breaks in between.

This way, he can finish his work in the same amount of time with half as much effort. However, you can also delegate your task to someone else and get assessment help for low prices in Australia.

The Project Manager

Let’s suppose a project manager has a responsibility to manage a team while simultaneously catering to side-projects and constantly being pulled into meetings. This obviously makes her job more stressful and difficult.

However, she decides to use the Eisenhower matrix to classify her tasks into four categories. This way, she was able to filter out the tasks that are urgent and important from those that are urgent and not important, important but not urgent, and not urgent and not important. 

The Freelance Graphic Designer

A freelance graphic designer has a pretty flexible schedule, but he has a glaring problem. He sometimes ends up procrastinating, which leads him to stay up all night working continuously.

Not only does this severely harm his stress management abilities, but it also diminishes the quality of his work. To overcome this, he employs the time blocking strategy that allows him to delegate specific blocks of time to specific tasks.

FAQs About Time Management Skills

What are the top 3 most important time management skills?

Although many skills can help in managing time effectively, some skills can serve as good starting points. These would be prioritization, organization, and self-discipline. They will help you learn how to successfully integrate more skills for effective time management into your lifestyle.

Can time management skills be learned, or are they natural?

Time management skills aren’t natural or habitual; they can be learned. Although some people do seem to be naturally better at time management than others, it is all thanks to their practice.

What is the difference between time management techniques and habits?

Techniques are specific methods or systems that you apply to make time management easier, for example, the Pomodoro technique and the Eisenhower matrix. Habits, on the other hand, are routines and behaviors that you will develop through continuous practice. Well, you can easily turn time management techniques into habits if you practice them enough.

How long does it take to build strong time management skills?

There is no right answer for this question, as it depends on person to person. However, if you practice time management strategies continuously and consistently, then you will definitely see a considerable improvement in a few weeks. Continue from that point onwards, and you will naturally become an expert at managing time effectively.

Why do employers value time management skills?

A candidate who is punctual, reliable, and meets deadlines is a million times more skillful than a candidate who never arrives on time, cannot be trusted to meet deadlines, and is always late. This is why employers value candidates who have effective time management skills and can back their claims by producing results on time.

Conclusion

In the end, we would like to quote Peter F. Drucker: “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” Indeed, time management is the key to becoming a successful manager in all aspects of life. It doesn’t matter whether you are a student, a 9-5 worker, or a high-level professional; time management is essential and central to our work ethic. If you are a student who wants to learn time management skills, especially when writing an assignment, then you can always get help from Do My Assignment, and our experts will show you how to manage your time effectively while writing assignments in Australia.