Speak to professionals all over the world and time management emerges as one of the biggest problems. No matter the position in the organisation, professionals struggle to cope with finding time for the limitless amount of work expected of them.

In this blog, I will leave you with 6 essential steps to help you get better at time management.

1 - Plan

2 - Prioritise

3 - Schedule

4 - Do

5 - Reflect

6 - Improve

The 6 essential steps to ace time management:

1 - Plan

Planning is one of the most underrated things we do in our working lives. If you sit back and think about it for a minute or two, you will be able to identify areas in your personal life where you do plan. Why then, should planning not factor into our professional lives?

It is essential that you spend at least 15 minutes everyday to plan your work for the day. This can be at the start of the work day, or can be at the end of the day to plan for the next day. If you don't plan, you will end up spending a significant amount of time during the day chasing after the wrong things. You will also spend time context switching between different topics with no cohesion between them.

How to plan: You can start off with a pen and paper. As you get better, start to use a planning app - there are many many available. My favourites include Trello, Asana, Notion and Microsoft Planner (if you use O365).

2 - Prioritise

Well begun is half done. Once you have done your planning, you need to prioritise the work that has been planned. Answering the following questions will help you prioritise:

- In terms of dependency of tasks, which come first and which come later?

- Which tasks are more important?

- Which tasks are more urgent?

How to prioritise: One of my favourite frameworks to use to determine important and urgent tasks is the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. You can read in detail about the matrix at eisenhower.me.

3 - Schedule

Now that you have prioritised your tasks for the day, it's time to block time in your calendar to ensure that you stay on track. This is an important step in being true to yourself. If you have made a commitment to do a task on a day, block time in your calendar to spend time on it. This will help you focus on the task on hand.

There will also be tasks that you haven't done before or tasks that you don't know how long they will take to complete. For such tasks, timebox the activity. So, for example, if you need to do a piece of research on a topic, timebox that for 30 minutes or 60 minutes to ensure that you don't get lost in an activity.

4 - Do

While the first 3 steps are related to planning, the 4th step is where you actually get down to doing the work / activity / task at hand. Do it in the most efficient manner and seek help if you need to. Just doing the task, though, is not enough. Time yourself while doing the task. Timing yourself will help you discover how long it takes you to do a piece of work.

If you were to repeat the task, you will be better prepared to estimate how long it will take you. And each time you do a task, you can look for a more efficient way to do it, or a way that gives you a better outcome.

How to track your time: Use a stopwatch or an online app such as Clockify or TimeCamp.

5 - Reflect and 6 - Improve

The 5th step is to reflect on how you did. You can do this across multiple parameters such as time taken, quality of output, etc. It is important to reflect so that you are aware of how your planning has panned out. Has the planning helped you? Or has it hampered you?

You should regularly pause and reflect on the following questions:

- What is working [and hence you should do more of]?

- What is not working [and hence you should stop doing]?

Just reflecting, though, is not good enough. It is important to take the learnings from your reflection to focus on improving. The next time you have to do a similar task, you will be better prepared, can estimate the time better and also deliver a better quality outcome.

So, in summary:

1 - Plan

2 - Prioritise

3 - Schedule

4 - Do

5 - Reflect

6 - Improve