Manage Your Time In Multitasking World

Time management is one of those skills no one teaches you in school but you have to learn. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t organize information well enough to take it in. And it doesn’t matter how skilled you are if procrastination keeps you from getting your work done.

1. Do the most important thing first

When you sits down to work in the morning, before ypu checks any email, spend an hour on the most important thing on your to-do list. This is a great idea because even if you can’t get the whole thing done in an hour, you’ll be much more likely to go back to it once you’ve gotten it started.This dash works best if you organize the night before so when you sit down to work you already know what your most important task of the day is.

2. Don’t leave email sitting in your in box

“The ability to quickly process and synthesize information and turn it into actions is one of the most emergent skills of the professional world today,”. Organize email in file folders. If the message needs more thought, move it to your to-do list. If it’s for reference, print it out. If it’s a meeting, move it to your calendar.Take action on an email as soon as you read it.

3. Keep web site addresses organized

Use book marking services like del.icio.us to keep track of web sites. Instead of having random notes about places you want to check out, places you want to keep as a reference, etc., you can save them all in one place, and you can search and share your list easily.

4. Think about keystrokes

If you’re on a computer all day, keystrokes matter because efficiency matters. “On any given day, an information worker will do a dozen Google searchers. “How many keystrokes does it take? Can you reduce it to three? You might save 10 seconds, but over time, that builds up.”

5. Organize your to-do list every day

If you don’t know what you should be doing, how can you manage your time to do it? Some people like writing this list out by hand because it shows commitment to each item if you are willing to rewrite it each day until it gets done. Other people like software that can slice and dice their to-do list into manageable, relevant chunks. 

6. Dare to be slow

Remember that a good time manager actually responds to some things more slowly than a bad time manager would. For example, someone who is doing the highest priority task is probably not answering incoming email while they’re doing it.  “There are more important tasks than processing email. Intuitively, we all know this. What we need to do now is recognize that processing one’s work (evaluating what’s come in and how to handle it) and planning one’s work are also mission-critical tasks.”