Take charge of your day: 6 tips to manage time like a pro
Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2025 5:22 am
Have you ever missed an important meeting or deadline despite your best intentions?
Studies show that 82% of people do not have a time management system, which often leads to poor task management, increased stress, and reduced productivity.
Mastering time management may seem like a daunting task, but it's more doable than you think. By applying a few tried-and-true time management strategies, you can take control of your work schedule, stay focused, and manage even the busiest of days.
In this article, we'll discuss the impact of poor time management and share six practical strategies to stop losing track of time and increase productivity.
Identify the causes of time management problems
To understand why we turkey number data lose track of time, we must take into account the external and internal factors that influence our daily lives.
Sometimes, it's as simple as spending too much time on social media and losing track of time. Other times, the problem can stem from our own miscalculations , such as underestimating how long a task will take.
Most of us spend too much time on the urgent and not enough on the important.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Let's explore some factors that contribute to this imbalance in time management:
1. Distraction
Despite our devices’ different focus modes and the ability to set app time limits, notifications still come flooding in. While some notifications provide useful information, most are mere distractions.
Many are designed to encourage increased interaction with the app , which causes mental distraction from the current task and makes it difficult to refocus.
2. Poor estimation of duration
Not all tasks are created equal, even if they fall into the same category . Each task has its own variables. For example, if you regularly adjust a team's schedule by one hour, you can start allocating that same amount of time to similar tasks.
However, when unexpected challenges arise—such as custom feature requests or customer delays—your schedule can be thrown off course. As a product manager, you might estimate that the integration phase of a project will take two weeks based on past experience, but overlook unforeseen issues that could extend the timeline and disrupt other planned activities.
This can lead to you losing track of time and hinder your overall productivity.
3. Lack of clear goals
Having long-term goals is crucial to effective planning. Research shows that setting specific, challenging goals can improve performance by up to 90% .
Without defined goals, it's easy to drift through the workday without a clear end point, spending time on seemingly easy tasks that don't contribute to your long-term aspirations.
4. Neurodivergence and time perception
While managing time anxiety is a big issue for many, it is especially difficult for neurodivergent people.
For example, people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may experience "time blindness," which impairs their ability to perceive time accurately , leading them to overestimate or underestimate the duration required for tasks.
Additionally, they may find it difficult to stay focused, prompting them to multitask or engage in secondary activities that help them concentrate. However, this can lead them to focus more intentionally on a particular task, causing them to miss deadlines.
Studies show that 82% of people do not have a time management system, which often leads to poor task management, increased stress, and reduced productivity.
Mastering time management may seem like a daunting task, but it's more doable than you think. By applying a few tried-and-true time management strategies, you can take control of your work schedule, stay focused, and manage even the busiest of days.
In this article, we'll discuss the impact of poor time management and share six practical strategies to stop losing track of time and increase productivity.
Identify the causes of time management problems
To understand why we turkey number data lose track of time, we must take into account the external and internal factors that influence our daily lives.
Sometimes, it's as simple as spending too much time on social media and losing track of time. Other times, the problem can stem from our own miscalculations , such as underestimating how long a task will take.
Most of us spend too much time on the urgent and not enough on the important.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Let's explore some factors that contribute to this imbalance in time management:
1. Distraction
Despite our devices’ different focus modes and the ability to set app time limits, notifications still come flooding in. While some notifications provide useful information, most are mere distractions.
Many are designed to encourage increased interaction with the app , which causes mental distraction from the current task and makes it difficult to refocus.
2. Poor estimation of duration
Not all tasks are created equal, even if they fall into the same category . Each task has its own variables. For example, if you regularly adjust a team's schedule by one hour, you can start allocating that same amount of time to similar tasks.
However, when unexpected challenges arise—such as custom feature requests or customer delays—your schedule can be thrown off course. As a product manager, you might estimate that the integration phase of a project will take two weeks based on past experience, but overlook unforeseen issues that could extend the timeline and disrupt other planned activities.
This can lead to you losing track of time and hinder your overall productivity.
3. Lack of clear goals
Having long-term goals is crucial to effective planning. Research shows that setting specific, challenging goals can improve performance by up to 90% .
Without defined goals, it's easy to drift through the workday without a clear end point, spending time on seemingly easy tasks that don't contribute to your long-term aspirations.
4. Neurodivergence and time perception
While managing time anxiety is a big issue for many, it is especially difficult for neurodivergent people.
For example, people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may experience "time blindness," which impairs their ability to perceive time accurately , leading them to overestimate or underestimate the duration required for tasks.
Additionally, they may find it difficult to stay focused, prompting them to multitask or engage in secondary activities that help them concentrate. However, this can lead them to focus more intentionally on a particular task, causing them to miss deadlines.