Time is a valuable resource. Once we use it, we never get it back. Yet, many of us allow poor time management and small distractions to steal precious minutes, lost forever. Whether it’s scrolling through social media, reacting to email notifications or hopping from task to task, time wasters are sneaky—they can quietly sabotage productivity and keep us from reaching our goals.
Of course, a core challenge is identifying them. Many time wasters are daily habits, so we don’t always see the damage they do to our productivity. Identifying and eliminating habits that waste time is the first step toward learning how to manage your time better.
In this article, we’ll explore practical time management strategies that will help you learn how to get control of your time and your life. From time blocking your schedule to task management and prioritizing with the Eisenhower Matrix and ABCDE method, learn proven strategies that will help. Stay focused, get more done and make progress toward your long-term goals with these time management tips.
Identify Time Wasters
Time wasters are sneaky thieves that could rob you of your potential. When you scroll through social media or watch cat videos, you’re sacrificing time that would most likely have been better spent elsewhere. You know how important managing your time is to success, yet how do you identify time wasters? Social media is obvious, but other time wasters include interruptions, working without a plan, a lack of organization and unclear goals.
Here are a few surefire ways to nurture your time and improve your productivity and focus:
Track Your Time
When you track every task, whether it’s work-related or otherwise, you gain a clearer picture of your daily habits. Similar to keeping a food diary, tracking all the time you use highlights the good and the bad—whether it’s a task that takes longer than it should or an unproductive pattern that you can change.
Differentiate Between Urgent and Important
It’s easy to get wrapped up in urgent tasks. However, it can be just as easy to miss important deadlines when the line between urgent and important isn’t clear. The difference between the two is in their timing and impact.
An urgent task demands immediate attention: a ringing phone, a last-minute client request or an important contract signing. They often have deadlines attached and can feel stressful, even if they aren’t aligned with your goals. The phone can go to voicemail and you can return the call once you finish your current task, but the client request and contract signing may indeed need attention.
Important tasks, on the other hand, contribute to long-term success and either personal or business growth. Even though they may not have pressing deadlines, they can’t be ignored forever. This includes items like continuing education classes, scheduling blogs and social media posts, and client outreach. They must be done for long-term growth and success, but you can schedule them into your day instead of dropping everything to do them now.
Consider Planning by the Week, Not the Day
Planning is also critical when it comes to learning how to improve your time management skills. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey suggests that planning by the week and adjusting daily is more effective than planning by the day. This is because you plan around priorities instead of being controlled by the next urgent thing that arises.
Implementing Time Blocking
When time blocking, you divide your day into blocks of time, each with a specific purpose. For example, you might block out your day like this:
- 8–10 a.m. – Working on a project
- 10–11 a.m. – Checking email, social media
- 11 a.m.–1 p.m. – Meetings
- 1:30–2:30 p.m. – Lunch
- 2:30–4 p.m. – To-do list items
Your daily planner can easily be adapted to time blocking, and you can incorporate those pesky to-do lists. Time blocking can help you manage multiple projects and responsibilities without getting bogged down by distractions. It’s particularly useful if your productivity gets derailed by constant interruptions and requests for a “quick” Zoom meeting, because you can block out part of your day to handle those.
Time blocking offers more structure than to-do lists and the ability to immediately see your priorities.
Prioritize Tasks for Effective Time Management
Prioritizing is also key when learning how to manage your time. Before you time block your calendar, list and prioritize the tasks you need to complete. There are many methods to help you prioritize the tasks you need to complete—the Eisenhower Matrix, ABCDE and Eat the Frog, for example—and they’re all useful.
Just pick one that works for you and your goal-setting strategies.
As you begin prioritizing your to-do list and blocking out time, consider your long-term goals. Items that further those goals naturally land higher in priority than those that do not. For example, say your goal is to communicate more effectively with clients and colleagues. Prioritizing clear, timely communication with them would be vital.
Eisenhower Matrix
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, was also the supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe during World War II. Throughout his career, Eisenhower had to make many challenging decisions—leading him to devise a method of prioritizing tasks for maximum effectiveness.
The Eisenhower Matrix is also called the Urgent-Important Matrix. Using four quadrants, tasks are sorted into boxes:
- Do first: Items in this quadrant are important and urgent; they often have deadlines.
- Schedule: These important items must still be done, but they are not urgent.
- Delegate: These are not important but urgent tasks can be delegated.
- Eliminate: Anything that is neither important nor urgent can (and possibly should) be eliminated.
ABCDE
Have you worked through your to-do list, dutifully checking items off, feeling accomplished, before realizing that nothing you completed was actually important?
This is where the ABCDE method can help. This method helps you prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency.
- “A” tasks are the most important, typically with looming deadlines. Contracts, bill payments or visiting key clients often fit here because there can be serious consequences if you miss something.
- “B” tasks are still important, but typically without deadlines and heavy consequences.
- “C” tasks are nice to do next. They’re less important, but still urgent.
- “D” tasks can often be delegated and vary in importance.
- “E” tasks can safely be eliminated without negative consequences.
When using the ABCDE method, finish the “A” items before moving on to less important “B” items, and so on.
Eat the Frog
Although it sounds silly, Eat the Frog is attributed to motivational speaker Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog! The concept stems from a piece of wisdom often attributed to Mark Twain, which says that if it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
The frog represents the most difficult or unpleasant task that, if handled first, will result in a more productive or less stressful day. It’s unclear whether Twain really said this, but the idea makes sense. By tackling the most challenging aspects of your day first, you can minimize procrastination and get more done.
Building Self-Discipline One Step at a Time
Self-discipline is the ability to work through distractions and discomfort to achieve your long-term goals. It means sticking to it, even when you don’t want to crawl out of bed.
All time management methods require self-discipline. After all, what good is blocking out an hour to research information for an article if you allow yourself to get sidetracked by social media?
Here are a few steps you can take to improve self-discipline:
- Get comfortable with discomfort. Our society is designed for comfort, which in some ways is nice. For example, air conditioning in hot climates and same-day delivery. In the realm of time management, however, modern creature comforts like social media scrolling are the enemy of productivity.
- Start with small wins. You’ve heard the saying, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Well, neither were good habits. Pick one thing at a time and do it consistently.
- Show up consistently. Whether your goals are personal or professional, being consistent beats periodic moments of greatness.
- Get used to delayed gratification. This may be the most difficult for some! In our instant gratification world of same-day delivery and online shopping, we sometimes forget that the best things in life take more time to achieve.
If you struggle with self-discipline, that’s OK. Although more research is needed on the role genetics play when it comes to self-discipline, it’s a skill you can build and improve upon. Building self-discipline takes time, clear goal-setting and solid routines—it’s a continuous process of making choices that align with your goals.
Reviewing and Adjusting Your Time Management Strategies
A crucial part of managing your time is creating a routine for reviewing your schedule—and making adjustments to keep everything running smoothly. Fortunately, this aspect of time management is relatively easy.
Start by choosing a review interval. Whether it’s weekly, monthly or another timeframe, reviewing your schedule and time management strategies is crucial. Not only does it help you adjust when something isn’t working, but it also gives you feedback on what is working.
For example, if you schedule weekly, take a few minutes each day to assess your progress.
Ask yourself a few questions:
- Did everything get done?
- Did something need more time than anticipated?
- Did you remember to schedule short breaks?
- Did an urgent matter require your immediate attention? If so, did another task get postponed?
Be honest with yourself! If an item took longer than you expected, was it because you misjudged it or because you got distracted by your phone or email?
Unfinished items shift to tomorrow’s schedule. Use your preferred time management matrix to determine their level of importance or urgency. Also, be sure to allow some flexibility for last-minute urgent items that crop up.
When you develop a habit of planning and reviewing those plans, you also get better at avoiding the distractions, making steady progress toward your goals.
Taking Control of Your Time
In business and life, your time isn’t just valuable, it’s your most strategic asset. Every minute wasted is a minute that could have been spent building your future. Unfortunately, time wasters don’t always look like distractions. They often disguise themselves as seemingly urgent items, endless emails or meetings without focus.
By identifying those hidden time drains, using proven strategies like time tracking and time blocking in conjunction with prioritization methods like Eat the Frog, and building self-discipline, you can make a change. You can begin to create the structure you need to thrive amid the chaos of life. More importantly, you can make sure your daily efforts align with your long-term goals.
You can learn how to manage your time effectively. Take control of your time, starting now—choose one strategy from this guide and begin using it today. Block time for complex or difficult work, streamline your to-do list, or finally eat that frog. The momentum you build by making conscious choices can become the foundation of tomorrow’s growth.
