Time Management Tips 2020 (Work less and play more)

Published June 16, 2020 · Updated June 17, 2020

Efficiency in doing most of your work may be more important than the work itself, and this efficiency will only be achieved by organizing time and using it in a correct way, and for this you are here looking for tips to organize time. Welcome! and allow me to greet you because you are looking for important things to develop your life!

If you are one of those suffering from wasting time or you are:

A Student seeking tips for organizing time between study and other activities.
Employee and you want to prioritize your tasks.
You work in the field of free-lancing and want to organize your time, especially since there is no watchman for you.
Housewife and want to get ideas to organize your time regarding your homework.
work in social media or site management and want to stay away from distraction and work efficiently.

You have come to the right place because in this article you will find practical and proven time management tips, these tips are based on scientific studies, and also on many personal experiences, including my humble experience.

In this article you will learn the following:

How to monitor yourself and your time in a practical and effective way.
How organizing your tasks may be one of the reasons for wasting time.
What is the Pareto principle and how do you depend on it for time management.
How the word “no” helps you to organize time.

And this is not all, there are some bad habits that you have to get rid of, as well as some questions that may be on your mind about organizing time, such as?

Do I have to work in the morning times?
How do you resist forgetfulness?
What are the best times to play and have fun?

All of these questions and more will find an answer to them between the lines of this article, in which you will find many practical examples until the image becomes complete for you.

1- Watch yourself

This is one of the best time management tips that I benefited personally from, when you ask yourself, “What have you lost so long?” And you can not answer specifically, it means that there is a problem.

A lot of times you find yourself curated in a black hole called Social Media, watching YouTube, online games, and other activities where you don’t feel the time.

Even if you are working on a specific matter, you find yourself holding the phone and opening Instagram to browse some pictures of influencers, models, and others?

When you watch yourself, you will get to know:

Activities that consume the most amount of time.
Sites where you spend a lot of time.
The apps and games you use excessively on the phone.
The time it takes to perform a certain task.

There are several time management apps that can help you, perhaps the best of them is Rescue Time, this great app will enable you to:

Automatically know every second you spend on any website or application.
You can specify sites or applications that you do not want to track.
Get notifications about the tasks you want to perform.

This application will make you see the fact that you organize the time, and you will see with your own eyes what you do every day to realize for yourself the amount of time that you waste on activities that are not useful to you.

Then you will make the right decisions yourself, you may stop using certain sites during working hours, or remove some games that steal time.

2- Do the job at the best time for you

We all know that scientifically, the best times when the brain is active and in full focus are morning times … but there are many people who stay up late and prefer work at night.

The biological clock in the human body depends on your personal habits, so do not force yourself into things that you are not used to, and do not change your habits suddenly.

The goal of this advice is to ask yourself, “What are the best times for me to be energetic?” Then these times are devoted to work or study.

You should never waste these times playing or entertaining. Rather, you should use it to carry out the most difficult tasks that you have to do in the day.

My advice is to try to gradually change your personal habits until you wake up early in the morning, currently at 6 am as I write these words.

I wake up every day at 4:30 in the morning, and take advantage of the morning hours to implement the most important thing I have to do in the day.

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3- Set a deadline for each action you take

Suppose you have to do some tasks like:

You want to study some physics.
Design a specific project in your business.
Writing some e-mails.

Set a specific time limit (half an hour – an hour) for any task or work that you want to do. The time limit, of course, depends on the nature of your work or study.

Setting a specific deadline for anything you want to do has many benefits such as:

You will push yourself to work hard because there is a deadline.
You will resist boredom or indolence because your mind knows that it has to do the work for a specified period, especially if the period is short.
You will be able to arrange your tasks correctly.
You will monitor your competence in work or study and know the time required to complete any task required of you.
You will be able to complete a large number of tasks at the same time.
You will be able to determine the times of rest and play without affecting your work or feel remorse until you play with peace of mind.

And do not worry if you do not achieve the desired goal within the specified time, you can allocate part of the day to complete some tasks that you did not finish, and also with time you will improve and finish your tasks in the time allotted to them because you will know how much time each task requires.

4- Organize tasks earlier

The mind, contrary to what some people think, does not like to take many decisions. He loves everything to be arranged in front of him until he performs directly.

Certainly, you have heard about the importance of using To-do Lists and their benefits in time management, there is no dispute about that, but this is not what I’m talking about.

This point is intended to organize these tasks earlier, preferably before going to sleep, so that you work the next day without any hindrances.

This method of organizing tasks may seem simple, but you will only believe its results when you try it yourself.

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5- Don’t waste too much time arranging what you need to do

Think carefully about this saying, “The time you spend organizing your work is a time that you do not use to do your work.” Often, and contrary to what is expected, organizing the work harms the work itself.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you want to respond to the e-mails received by you at work, and given that many e-mails want to organize and arrange them first, according to importance before you respond to them.

Thinking that you are in this way organizing your time and work, but think carefully about what you did. Isn’t the time that you spent arranging emails the first time you used to respond to the emails themselves?

The same example applies in studying, supposing you want to review biology, then you arrange and organize chapters and information that you have to review and the questions that you have to solve.

Didn’t you then feel bored or pressured because you had to do a lot of tasks? Didn’t find yourself taking too much time arranging and planning?

Of course, each rule has an exception, and sometimes you have to spend some time arranging to do a certain thing, but often you don’t need a complicated arrangement.

Also, according to many psychology studies, some of us take a lot of time to organize in order to give ourselves a feeling that we are working or studying, or that we are accomplishing great tasks and this in order to deceive ourself and our conscience

6- Follow the 20/80 rule

Pareto principle is a rule made by a famous Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto, which was named after him, and later became known as the 20/80 rule.

“80% of the results you achieve depend only on 20% of your efforts.”

This rule is confirmed by many scholars and researchers that it applies to almost everything, and if you think about it yourself, you will find it applies to all activities that you do in your life.

You know that there are certain subjects in the curriculum that you have to care about because the exam focuses on them.
You know when designing a logo, for example, that the most important thing is fonts.
You know while making a video that the most important thing about it is sound quality.
You know that the most important thing in arranging your company’s accounts is budgeting.

We can look at it from a different perspective:

The time it takes to study, if you look carefully at it, you will find that only about 20% of it achieves the majority of results (such as training in solving questions).
The time you spend each day on your business, if you look carefully, you will find that only about 20% of it will achieve the most results (such as comprehensive reporting).

And you will find that the remaining 80% of your activities at work (routine meetings – writing emails – speaking to your friends) do not affect your payoff in the work itself, but sometimes it also hinders you from doing your job well.

This time management tip is meant to identify the 20% that affects the majority of results in something you do, in order to give it a priority and focus on it.

It is better to give these 20% more time than other tasks, thus achieving exceptional results.

7- Learn to say no

Do any of the following happen with you?

A friend of yours calls you to go to him to help him with a specific matter.
A friend at work asks you to explain some of the things he finds a problem with.
A group of your friends calls you and asks you to go out with them for a walk or to play during your study time or work.

If you are facing one of these or similar situations, what is your reaction then? I think you often agree. And that’s exactly what I want you to change.

Learn to say no, know not to respond to anything that causes you to stop what you are doing, as long as you have set a specific time to work as you indicated earlier you should not give up.

Of course, there is an exception to each rule, as your friend may need you in something critical and necessary.

8- Resist forgetting in an effective way

One of the most important obstacles that stand in the way of organizing time is forgetting. There are many tasks that you have to do every week or month, and you may forget some of them because of your preoccupations.

That is why you have to fight to forget by making a calendar of what matters most to you every month, so you will never forget anything.

When you are asked for a specific command or want to perform a specific task with a specific time and place it in a schedule, you can use any tool that enables you to do it such as Google Calendar.

When you do this you will be able to:

Find out all you have to do in any month, time, and date.
Arrange your priorities correctly.
You will make your daily to-do list based on the goals you want every month.
You will be able to constantly update and modify the tasks required of you so that you do not forget anything.

In this way, you will not forget anything required of you and, also you will plan all of your tasks based on what is required of you without any shortening or wasting time.

9- Leave the phone away while working

It took me a long time to get rid of this bad habit, the phone is one of the most important distractions that you have to get rid of while studying or working.

So without any discussion, leave your phone somewhere else while you work. Put it in another room or leave it in a locked drawer, or at least make it silent.

10- Collect similar tasks together all at once

There are many tasks that you may perform more than once throughout the day, such as:

Reply to e-mails.
Writing some homework.
Review reports.
Design photos for your accounts on social media.

Try to collect these tasks and execute them simultaneously, in this way you will save yourself a lot of time and also you will perform these tasks more efficiently.

11- Don’t seek to be perfect

This problem I personally suffer from a lot of times, and I still resist it and train myself to change it, because it is a cause of wasting a lot of time.

The pursuit of perfectionism makes you spend a lot of time adjusting and delaying the work you do, and this is what you must change.

Of course, everyone wants to accomplish the tasks to the fullest, but that does not mean that everything you do will be a legendary architectural masterpiece?

Most of the time, you fulfill your requirement with acceptable quality in a short time, much better than implementing it with fantastic quality in a long time, this will make you produce and work more in less time.

With time, you will learn from your mistakes and improve, especially if you are doing creative work such as writing, design or programming.

12- Recharge your energy by taking breaks between each task

Rest is necessary when you separate your mind from work or study between each task and the other, it regains your activity, and you will give yourself an incentive to continue.

And that is not all if you want to stimulate your mind while doing any task, set aside rest time to do the best activities you love.

For example, allocate a specified time to:

Play your favorite game.
You watch most of the YouTube channels that you follow regularly.
You read the best books you love or want to read.
To talk to your best friends on different chatting programs.
In order to go for a little walk.

This way your brain will secrete Dopamine – a chemical secreted by the brain, which is responsible for happiness.

The more you do this constantly, the more your brain will return that when it completes the tasks required of it, it will get the reward it awaits, and this helps you to finish the tasks required of you quickly and efficiently.

Time management is very important, especially in the information age that we currently live in. There are a lot of tasks required of us and information that we have to absorb and deal with.

Just as time is the most valuable currency we own, so we must make sure that every second we spend goes in what is beneficial to us, because what we spend from the time, we cannot recover again.

For the same reason, these time management tips are only a drop of Ghaith, we have not started yet … For this I want you to follow the winners continuously by activating the notifications from the red bell below.

There is a lot of information and methods on organizing time and increasing productivity, which we will publish in turn. Be sure not to miss this information, as one of them may change your life for the better.

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Thanks for reading
BrainFood+ Team.