As a busy professional, it’s essential to master time management if you want to be successful.

While there may be many things vying for your attention throughout the workday, the bulk of your time should be spent on the tasks and activities most conducive to your success. Like how a budget tells your money where to go, effective time management is you “telling your time where to go” instead of just haphazardly addressing any and everything that comes your way with no order or intention.

Without proper time management, you’re more likely to suffer from increased stress levels, produce low-quality work, miss deadlines and disrupt your work-life balance. So, how can you control your time and set yourself up for success? Let’s look at three practices you can implement today to improve your time management!

PRACTICE 1: SET SMART GOALS.

Goals act as a map on your journey to successful time management. To ensure you reach the appropriate destination, you must set goals that are SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. This brings the necessary level of structure to allow you to track progress easily.

Pro Tip: Don’t overload yourself with too many goals. There's no magic number for everyone, but setting three goals for a 90-day period is a good starting place. Remember, you’ll need to break each goal into actionable tasks to accomplish during that time frame.

PRACTICE 2: PLAN AHEAD.

Planning ahead involves thinking about the things you need to do before it is time to start doing them. Two simple things you can start doing to plan ahead include:

1. Blocking off one hour each weekend to plan your upcoming week 

2. Taking 15 minutes each night to plan the following day

These exercises allow you to focus on the big picture before all the details of each day begin to take over.

Remember the goals we discussed in Practice 1? Planning ahead involves breaking those goals down into manageable tasks and assigning a time to accomplish them. It also involves outlining any items you know you need to complete that given day/week.

Pro Tip: Write your vision and make it plain! Sometimes chaos arises with the possibility of throwing off your entire day. Having your plan written makes it easier to reference specific tasks rather than trying to remember everything you want to accomplish. This will help to keep you on track with your goals!

PRACTICE 3: MAINTAIN A SINGLE TO-DO LIST.

There are so many ways to create to-do lists these days – apps on the phone, digital note-taking software, old-fashioned pen and paper, etc. It doesn't matter how you create your to-do list, but you must maintain a single to-do list to ensure that you have a single source of truth. Any alternative will leave you vulnerable to the possibility of forgetting things that require your attention.

To take it a step further, you should break your to-do list down into the following sections: (1) must-do, (2) should-do, and (3) if I have time. Every task is not created equally. Therefore, you should be adding a priority to the task at the point of writing it down.

Pro Tip: Make sure that your to-do list is portable. Otherwise, you'll find yourself constantly transferring things from one place to your master to-do list.

NEXT STEPS

Are you interested in learning more time management tips? Check out our FREE Time Management Toolkit, which includes 10 practical tips to improve your time management and time tracking worksheets to monitor where you’re spending your time.