Do you feel like you have so many things to do that you wish the day had more than 24 hours? I indeed did at some point. With so many things to do at work and tons of chores to do at home, I barely had time to sleep before the next day began.
For many of us freelancers, our tasks don’t just end after 8 hours of work a day; we often have many projects going on at once for different clients. When I was starting my career as a freelancer, I struggled a lot to manage my time; you could say that I used to bite more than I could chew. I had to constantly ask for deadline extensions and missed project deliveries, and it was even a hassle to find some time for myself and my personal relationships.
At that time, it was hard to accept that I couldn’t take over that much work by myself. I was motivated and I wanted to take on the challenge because more work meant more money and more recognition, but, in truth, I was ignoring something really important: I wasn’t aware of my own limits.
I wanted to continue pushing myself, and it took quite some time and some consequences until I realized the importance of keeping a healthy work mindset and a good work/life balance.
So, I took the challenge of trying to improve my time management skills. I downloaded hundreds of organizational apps, organized my calendar, and watched some YouTube tutorials, and nothing really seemed to work, at least not in my case.
It wasn’t until I learned about the principles of awareness, arrangement, and adaptability that I finally understood that I wasn’t going to find the solution in some app or by racking my brain trying to organize my calendar as efficiently as possible…
These types of apps and techniques are tools that can help you improve your time management skills, but for them to truly work, you have to change from within, you have to strive to understand yourself better and be aware of your own limits, organize your goals and your time effectively, and learn how to adapt to every unexpected situation.
When I found out about the importance of awareness, arrangement, and adaptability, my work life started to take a turn in the right direction, and I also started to feel so much better about my work as a freelancer and my work/life balance. Now, I want to share what I found with others so that I can help you to stop struggling at work and have more time to rest when you are at home.
These are the three vital skills you need to improve your time management.
Why Is It Important To Improve Your Time Management Skills?
Time management is the process of organizing and managing your time. It means to work smart, not hard, and to focus your time on the things that are most important to you.
The benefits of time management are simple. Good time management helps you schedule your time between important activities, enabling you to achieve greater levels of performance and productivity. Achieving more significant results in a short period leads to a decrease in your stress and gives you more time to spend with the people who matter the most to you.
Many benefits come with improving your time management skills, so I summarized the most important ones so you can see what you’ll be achieving:
1. Less stress: Good time management means meeting tight deadlines and planning your time. And not having problems when meeting deadlines will cause a significant decrease in your stress levels and increase your confidence. It will also allow you to improve your sleep schedule and create a better work-life balance.
The best advice that I can give you is to identify the biggest causes of stress that impact your sleep schedule and your ability to manage time and then take action to try to ameliorate or eliminate this stress. I know you can do it if you put your mind to it.
2. Better work-life balance: Work-life balance creates a good balance between your professional and personal life. When you spend long hours at work, you risk burnout and feeling tired all the time. This will highly decrease your motivation and you can miss deadlines altogether.
We have a great article where we tackle this matter; you can check “Work/Life Balance-Start Setting Healthy Boundaries” to learn more about having a better work-life balance.
3. More free time: When you have greater time freedom, you can focus your time on setting and achieving your biggest goals. It also ensures you have more time to spend with family and friends, deepen relationships, and pursue new hobbies. It allows you to find and follow your purpose in life.
4. Greater focus: Remember, good time management doesn’t mean expanding your to-do list and working longer; it means working smarter, not harder. Effective time management increases your focus and improves your productivity, allowing you to capture bigger opportunities and spend more time on the projects, goals, and people that truly matter.
5. Less procrastination: It’s easy to procrastinate when you don’t know how to manage your own time, and when you aren’t clear and focused on your goals. Managing your time ensures you feel in control of your workload and helps to stop procrastination.
6. Things are simpler and easier: Good time management ensures you feel clear and confident about how to use your time. As a result, you stop feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and frustrated, enabling you to be more focused on your work reaching your goals, and overall making your job easier.
7. Less distraction: Effective time management increases focus, eliminates distractions, and boosts concentration. Distractions often happen when you have too much work, that’s why effective time management is one that set significant boundaries around your time to increase focus on your biggest priorities and reduce overwhelm and distraction.
8. Increased energy: Increased energy helps you focus on your most important work. When you work longer and harder, your energy levels can drop, and you feel tired all the time. At this time, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and start procrastinating, that’s why is important to take regular breaks throughout the day to keep your energy levels high and increase productivity.
9. Time to think: Having time to think about how to make progress on your goals is as important as taking action. Good time management ensures you have time for strategic and creative planning time. As a result, you can be more productive and focused with the time you have.
10. Higher productivity levels: time management skills aim to increase productivity and get more things done in less time. At the end of the day, all of these benefits can result in increased productivity, so remember to be aware of your limits, plan effectively, and be prepared for any mishaps that may happen along the way.
Skills You Need To Improve Time Management
Now that we know the benefits of improving your time management skills, that leaves the question, “How do I get better at it?”. Downloading apps? Following new strategies? Praying? Although these options might help you to improve your time management skills, there are three skills that you need to develop: Awareness, arrangement, and adaptability.
Awareness to start thinking realistically about your time and understand that it is a limited resource. Arrangement to improve your organizing and planning skills, and schedule activities and tasks effectively. Lastly, I need adaptability to adjust to interruptions or changing priorities.
These three skills will be the key to fulfilling all your duties on time, so we’ll go through each one in detail to understand how to develop them and what you will achieve by doing so.
1. Awareness:
To be more aware, you have to start by analyzing how you spend your time —not how you think you spend it, but how you spend time off and on tasks.
Write down your specific schedule, how much you get done during the day, and at what time. Also, try to write down the time you spent procrastinating and resting.
Once you have a clear view of how you realistically spend your day, you will be able to find your peak performance hours and those hours where you are most likely not to be doing anything.
Peak performance occurs when you feel your best physically, emotionally, and cognitively. Depending on the person, this could be first thing in the morning after a cup of coffee, after having lunch, or even late at night. Figuring out when you do your best work will allow you to structure your day around it and have the necessary rest before your peak performance hours.
Once you start to get a hold of how you spend your time, try categorizing it. You can put it into two broad categories: “Controllable” and “Uncontrollable”. Controllable time is the time you manage on your own, it’s when you can decide where you do the tasks you are supposed to do.
Uncontrollable is the time that might be controlled by a supervisor or manager, time spent in obligatory meetings or calls, and such. There’s not much we can do when something is uncontrollable, so my best advice is not to worry about it and do your best, but when you have control of your time, you have to try to optimize these chunks of time in the best way possible. How do you do that?
Start by thinking about what you need to get done, what you want to get done, and what you don’t want to get done. When you have tons of work, procrastination is bound to come, so the best thing you can do is try and plan it out.
Be aware of your strengths and challenges, think about the most complex tasks for you, the ones that tend to carry extra downtime to accomplish, and plan them out in a way that they are doable and digestible, with proper time to rest in between.
Remember that being aware also means knowing when and who to ask for help.
If you are not working by yourself, it’s most likely that one of your coworkers is better at doing specific tasks than you are, and by sharing or delegating tasks, you are bound to save time. When you find that or those coworkers, make a habit of returning the favor, offering your expertise to make their to-do list easier.
This not only makes more of everyone’s work enjoyable, but it also serves to guard against losing “sunk cost” time—those hours spent chasing a problem just because you started and now “have to” keep going. By sharing or delegating in a way that is okay with everyone, you break that cycle, allowing each task to be put to rest by an expert at doing so.
2. Arrangement:
Knowing how you spend your time is just the tip of the iceberg. Knowing this information will allow you to arrange your schedule more efficiently. Whether paper or electronic, you need a way to keep track of your many tasks, even more, if you have a busy schedule.
Remember that not every calendar looks the same, and take your time to create your own calendar that tailors to your needs and keep a record of what you did each day and what you plan to do the following day.
You can try to divide your tasks into portions and divide complex tasks into a handful of smaller tasks and assign a dedicated preemptive time to each of them so that you can devote your time to get them done in a single period entirely.
Avoid multitasking at all costs; the best way to be truly productive is to focus on each task at once; that’s why it is essential to learn how to identify your priorities and plan and determine how long something actually takes to produce.
Remember that having a plan doesn’t mean that you have to follow it to a T, reassess your arrangement regularly and make changes when necessary. Many roads lead to your objective, and as long as you keep on improving, you will start to see more of them, so don’t be afraid to change from plan A to plan B or even to completely go in a different direction because all of those changes are just more possibilities to improve.
Finally, don’t forget that the arrangement doesn’t only have to do with time; it is also about data. All the information you have used in the past has a degree of importance, maybe you’ll want to recheck it in the future, maybe not.
It is better to know where an important file could be in case you need it than not knowing anything at all… Don’t forget to keep track of where you store past files, previous projects, and important emails.
You can click here to learn more about maintaining an organized digital workspace.
3. Adaptability
This is where you are going to put everything together. Once you know yourself and know how you spend your time, who controls it, and how you can best divide and allocate your time, it’s time to put it into practice.
Developing awareness and arrangement is impossible if you don’t put it into practice in your daily life.
Thinking about deadlines and long-term planning can be stressful, so try not to go that far ahead. Start somewhere comfortable, take baby steps, try organizing your calendar in a new way, maybe check out some organizational apps, and stick to them for a while.
Little by little, keep trying to explore new possibilities, and before you notice, you’ll be forming new managing habits that will become the new normal in your life.
Remember, the more you practice, the more you refine and hone your newly developed habits. If you don’t know where to start, these are some excellent tips for you to start developing adaptability:
- Develop healthy habits. Combine your time management behaviors with new healthy habits. e.g., track daily progress, record tasks, and update your calendar.
- Timed procrastination. When tasks seem overwhelming, it’s best to focus your maximum effort into 15-30-minute intervals and then dedicate some minutes to relax the mind before starting again. If you are looking for techniques like this, I recommend the Pomodoro Technique.
- Experiment with time-tracker or checklist apps. Find the app(s) that work best for you.
- Contingency plans. Interruptions and delays might occur. Think about best-case/worst-case scenarios when you outline possible outcomes of your plans, deliveries, and projects.
- Reduce time wasters. Although fun and interesting, social media can make you waste a ton of time. I know. What seems to be 5 minutes on TikTok is 2 hours in real-time. So try to be more self-aware, avoid temptation, and block notifications and social media sites during critical work time. Once you are finished, you can reward yourself with as much rest and catching up as you would like.
Time Management Is Tough
Today’s world is constantly active and hyperconnected. It’s tough to stay focused when you have the whole world in the palm of your hand – literally. To truly take control of your time, you need to stop for a minute and reflect, think about how you spend your day and increase your awareness, make arrangements with intention, develop adaptive skills, and, most important of all, practice.
Don’t feel discouraged if your plans are not perfect when you start for the first time, you are starting to get to know yourself, and, as long as you keep going, your planning skills will get better and better! Remember, practice makes perfect, so follow your own path, make mistakes, learn from them, and I assure you that, before you notice, you’ll be the master of your own time.
Good luck!
See more articles by Ender Cárdenas.
