Time management itself is the process of organising your time between priorities to build better habits, and increase your productivity by improving focus, and self-confidence. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or a small business owner, improving your time management can help you meet your goals, increasing your happiness, and ultimately improve your work-life balance. Learning why investing your time efficiently helps you build a better picture of how much you can thrive if you set your sights to bettering this aspect of everyone’s lives.
Your main goal by changing or reviewing your time management is to overall maximise time spent on important work, whilst minimising stress and time spent on unimportant work. Good time management allows you to obtain higher levels of performance and productivity. When you work smarter, not harder, you achieve better results in less time with less effort.
1. Less stress
Less stress is always a good thing in our monkey brains, but it also has positive physical health benefits. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, lower stress means you sleep better, it’s easier to control your weight, you get sick less often, when you do get sick you get better fast, and you’ll have less tension in your muscles.
All of this can come from managing your time better inside and outside of the workplace. Achieving less stress through time management also increases your confidence as you’ll be achieving more throughout the days and weeks, making you an even better person to be around.
2. Work-life balance
Balancing your work and your life can be a challenge to us all. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like there’s enough hours in the day – or even weeks – to get your tasks done, pushing you towards the risk of burnout and feeling tired even after sleep.
One of the clearest benefits of good time management is your understanding of the value of your time. The way to achieve your goals becomes clearer, and you’ll have more time for the people and things that matter the most in your life and at home.
To ensure you make the most of your time, consider implementing efficient strategies such as tracking employee hours with tools like Workyard’s employee time tracking software. It can provide valuable insights and help you optimize your work hours, allowing for a more fulfilling personal life.
3. More freedom
Ensuring you have the freedom to do the things that matter most to you (strangely enough) makes you feel more free. The same way musicians play to metronomes and produce some amazing works bending the borders of genres in creative ways, you’ll be able to work in a zone of high focus and productivity within the limits of your time management. Blocking out time is almost exactly the same as playing to a metronome.
4. Greater focus
Big opportunities come to those that are able to focus on what they’re doing in a productive way. Prioritising effectively lets you take control of your days the smart way, building postive habits towards focussing in on the task at hand, and not on videos of dogs or your next Amazon purchase.
5. Higher levels of productivity
Having prioritised goals and tasks means you have more time to get quality work done throughout the week. Being more productive with your time is important to identifying your daily priorities. Identifying your priorities helps you spend your most productive time working on them. It’s a cycle of reinforcing one habit that reinforces another, that then reinforces the ones at the start, and as soon as that wheels turning in the right direction, it’s harder to stop.
6. Less procrastination
One of the main reasons for procrastination is a lack of time management. When things aren’t clear to you on how to achieve your goals, the boundaries of each task are softened and it becomes easy to lose focus, cause distractions, and leads to procrastination.
Time management isn’t something we’re all born with, and poor habits can stick with us throughout our lives. Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, noted in a 2007 study that 80-95% of college students engage in procrastination, approximately 75% consider themselves procrastinators, and almost 50% procrastinate consistently and problematically.
Procrastination doesn’t always come from a lack of motivation towards the tasks, but often from a fear of failure and no clear guides for tasks, but learning how to manage your time properly leads to confidence, clarity, and more productive time.
