The most precious resource we have is time. - Steve Jobs

There are 24 hours in a day, but most times we end the day without doing anything meaningful. Have you ever felt the time is not enough for you to get a particular task done? Ever wonder how everyone has the same time but some achieve more with their time than others? Well, that can only be done with good and effective time management.

Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity.

Time management aims to maximize the time spent on important things. In our daily activities, we never seem to have enough time, better time management may help us regain control of our days.

Time is free, but it's priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it, you can never get it back - Harvey Mackay

Why Is Time Management Important

Without strong time management, your work and wellbeing can suffer, and it can lead to:

• Producing poor quality work
• Missing deadlines
• Increasing your stress levels
• Ruining your work-life balance
• Harming your professional reputation

Time management is important because it prevents these and also helps in:

Improving your self-discipline: Time management improves self-discipline. This is a good way to have self-discipline and it also stops procrastination, which is a major problem that affects our personal, social, and financial lives

Enhances Your Performance: You'll have a better understanding of what you need to do and how long each activity should take when you learn to schedule time out of your day for all of your critical duties. When you have a plan to stick to, you'll probably discover that you spend less time debating what to work on or putting off crucial tasks and more time starting them. You may focus on only the most important activities at hand and avoid time-wasting distractions by using time management.

Produce Better Work: Have you ever rushed a project because of how little time you had to finish up? If you have, you'll see how disorganized that project would be. When something is not rushed it is beautiful and well organized. When you manage your time well, you can settle down and make a good project, you produce better work that you and another person would be satisfied with. The ability to manage your time well does not require you to work all night to accomplish a deadline. It implies that you efficiently manage your time, space out your tasks, and maintain a regular sleeping schedule. People claim that they regularly experience insufficient or poor-quality sleep and that this interferes with their everyday life. If you want to produce high-quality work, you must get a good night's sleep. Effective time management will enable you to accomplish this. If you want to produce high-quality work, you must get a good night's sleep. Effective time management will enable you to accomplish this.

Deliver Work on Time: It is important to deliver your work on time so you can correct any error that can occur or prevent any unforeseen circumstances. When your time is well managed you can submit on time and have enough time to make corrections.

Reduce Your Stress: When you have a long list of responsibilities, both at work and in your personal life, you feel overwhelmed. To make sure you know exactly what has to be done and how much time you have to finish it, it can be helpful to prioritize your to-do list and set aside the time required for your most crucial chores. You can lower your stress levels by prioritizing your duties and allowing yourself adequate time to do them. Good time management skills will make you more productive, helping you to meet your deadlines and lowering your stress levels.

Improved Career Opportunities: Employers love to see employees who are serious about their job and do them well. Submitting projects and work on time makes you look more professional and valuable. It also brings opportunities for you.

Helps us have time for things that matter: Most important things in our life like, relationships, academics, social life, family, finance, etc have suffered because we don't manage time. Time management helps us to touch every area of our life and use time wisely. Also helps in stopping us from making wrong decisions

How To Effectively Manage Your Time

Set a Goal: There is an aim or purpose for everything we do in life, no matter how small. We always want results. Nobody learns or works for something or someone without expecting results. How can we get that result effectively without wasting time? We set goals. To manage time effectively you need to set SMART goals.

• S - Specific: well-defined and clear
• M - Measurable: measure progress
• A - Achievable: not be something impossible
• R - Relevant: realistic
• T - Time-bound: a clear defined time

Make a To-do list:

The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one's day and every night to examine the result. - Alexis Carrel.

You can attest that this is one of the wonderful disciplines one can learn in life and use well. A to-do list is a list written daily to help you get organized and manage time. You write the things that you want to do and try to do them Most people get it wrong by writing a lot of things on their to-list, the shorter the better. Try writing things that you would do. Make it reasonable. Don't deceive yourself, if you know you would not do it, don't put it up. Also, it's advisable to know your strength, most people can easily carry out a hard task in the morning. Just know when you are most active and place the difficult task there. Make your to-do list accessible. If you're using a phone, there are many apps that can help you in planning like Google calendar, to-do list, etc. You can also make a list offline using a diary or a notepad. Anything that makes you comfortable.

Prioritize: This is something everyone needs to learn. These days we assume everything is important or urgent and we feel the need to do all of them, and it's not supposed to be so. Learn to prioritize, try placing things on scales and ranking them. See which is truly urgent and important and which is not. Use the 4 D's of time management : Delete: (not urgent+ not important) Do: (urgent + important) Delegate: (urgent + not important) Defer: (Not urgent + Important)

Stay Focus: For many of us, this is a huge issue. Staying focused on a task seems to be very difficult and we can easily get distracted. Many things distract us and we are almost always tempted by them. One notification on our mobile phones can cause us to lose focus for hours. Try fighting the temptation to get distracted. Francesco Ciulla says he does live stream on YouTube when he's writing a post on hashnode so that he doesn't lose focus and go on Twitter, he says, the fact that people are looking at him keeps him there till he is done writing. You can also switch off your phone. These are little sacrifices you have to make so you can comfortably finish up a task if you struggle to keep away from distraction. Also note, you don't need to stay up too long on a task.

Recognize stress: Once you notice you are stressed, stop. Don't allow yourself to get overworked before you take a break. Stress can cause a lot of harm, to the body and your work.

Take breaks: It's important to take short breaks after a task or when you are stressed. This helps to keep you active and energetic. You can try taking a walk or exercising. Just do something that would help make you relax and keep your mind active.

Maximize time management technologies: There are a lot of technologies that help in managing time. Technologies like Trello, Wunderlist, To doist, Any.do etc….

Don't multitask:

The shorter way to do many things is to only do one thing at a time. - Mozart

You can do two things at once but you can't focus effectively on two things at once. It may seem you're doing hard work but it decreases productivity. Do one thing at a time and you see how productive that would be. A way to help is to set a timer for each work done. So you can do it within a time range.

Be organized: Little things like keeping the books and pen where it's supposed to be, keeping your workstation organized to important things like focusing on your goals, planning activities, and keeping track of income and expenses can help in saving time. Try being organized. Remember, a stitch in time saves nine

Reward yourself Lastly, try rewarding yourself. A little motivator to make you do better next time. A small reward for every task. And you'll see yourself striving to finish early.

You can also read books on time management. Books like Eat that frog, Deep work, Getting things done, etc. You can download Eat that frog Here

You can also download Deep work by clicking here

Conclusion.

Like Alan Lakein said, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail". To manage your time well you have to make a good plan. Make your schedule and stick to your goal. Distraction is a big enemy to Time management. Find them and cut them off. Be strict with it. Always remember, time is money.