I’m pretty sure when most people hear this word, they cringe. So many people have a fear of the word ‘time management’ because of what it’s associated with, namely, the hustle.
However, today I’m here to dismantle the lie that time management is horrible and a nightmare, and instead I want to show you why it’s so important.
In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that time management is essential in our lives, and not just to make more money or progress in our career, but literally to live a good life.
Read until the end to find out about the 9 incredible benefits of time management.
What is time management?
Table of Contents
First thing first, what is time management?
According to this definition, ‘it is the process of organizing and planning how to divide your time between different activities.’
Basically, time management means that you work smarter not harder, and I don’t know about you, but that’s exactly what I want to do.
The reason so many people are afraid of this word, is because they think they’re going to have to work 24/7 and become like robots; but that’s the complete opposite.
Being good at time management means that you’ll actually be able to enjoy your life more, feel more fulfilled, and ultimately, achieve success.
You might also like: How to manage running a business when working full-time
What are the benefits of time management?
Now that you’ve had a little introduction, let me share with you what I think are the 9 main benefits of good time management.
Get more done
If you ever find yourself saying (or thinking) that 24 hours in a day are not enough to get it all done, then you need to improve your time management.
Mastering this skill will literally be life-changing, in that you’ll get to focus on what matters and still achieve more, especially when it comes to needle-moving activities in your life or business.
Less stress
Unfortunately, too many people deal with stress in our society today. This is due to the fact that we are driven by a sense of urgency, where everything is important and everything needs to be done right here right now.
This is absolutely damaging to our mental and physical health, but by improving our time management, we’re able to narrow down what is actually urgent and prioritise it.
If you find yourself dealing with a lot of stress, you might want to read this post.
More focused
Having long to-do lists won’t help you to be productive, instead, they will hinder you from reaching true productivity.
However, when you work on improving your time management, you’re able to remain focused on the tasks that matter, shorten your lists and stay productive.
Better time management will help you to keep your focus strong, so that you can move forward with your goals both in life and in your career, instead of wasting time on things that don’t matter.
Stay on track with your goals and vision
Tying into the point before, being a master of time management will help you to stay on track with your goals.
This is because you’ll have a clear vision of where to go and what steps you need to take, and you’ll be able to structure your days accordingly.
Do what matters
Life is too short to spend it doing things that are irrelevant. I used to find myself working for hours on end, thinking that I had had a very productive day when really I was just ticking things off a list.
The reality is that unless you’re intentional with how you spend your time, you’ll find yourself doing everything and anything but doing what matters.
Time management will help you to just stay focused on that so you can truly build a successful life.
Have more free time
As I just said on point 5, life is too short, and I don’t know about you but I don’t want to get to age 80 and wonder how I spent it.
I want to be able to build my own family, travel, work on my passion projects, spend time with my loved ones, and do things that bring me joy.
If I wasn’t organised and I wasn’t great at time management (not trying to blow my own trumpet here but I have to say I’m pretty good at it), I’d never be able to live a meaningful life.
I’d probably be spending my days between work and the endless errands required by adult life, and that doesn’t sound too good to me.
I want to be able to be efficient with my time and do what I have to do well, so that I have more time to do what I want to do.
Better work-life balance
Another reason why I highly recommend improving your time management is so that you can have a balance.
Yes, as much as many people believe this is impossible, I disagree with it.
I believe that by being intentional in how we spend our time, we can integrate our personal life with our professional life so we don’t live to work and we don’t lose our mind.
I’m extremely efficient at my job; I want to get everything done by the deadline and if possible, even before that. I also run my blog part-time, try to engage on social media and do blogging outreach, as well as build my investment portfolios (which take a while to a newbie like me).
Not to mention the fact that being in a relationship takes a lot of time (and I absolutely love it) and I try to cultivate my friendships and the relationship with my family, so time management is essential, to say the least.
Better work quality
Another reason why I absolutely LOVE time management, is because I produce a much better quality of work, making fewer mistakes and just generally being more efficient.
When you have long lists, you don’t know how to prioritise and you get distracted quite easily, it’s very likely that you’ll make mistakes along the way, which will then take double the time to get fixed.
That’s why I believe that time management is incredible to help you carry out a better quality of work.
Less procrastination
Finally, sometimes our lists are so overwhelming that all we do is freeze and hope they disappear when we turn around. But that, obviously, never happens.
This leads us to procrastinating as we wait for a better time to do things, but the better time never comes.
When you master your time management, however, your procrastination levels go down and you’re finally able to achieve more.
How to improve your time management
Now to the practical part; how do you actually improve your time management?
I’m glad you asked! I’m going to share a few tips with you below, get ready to take notes!
Write shorter to-do lists
This is possibly the most important step. Many people set themselves up for failure right from the beginning because they write huge to-do lists.
Obviously, I know very well how busy life can get and how many demands we have to attend to, but we also need to be realistic and understand that even the most organised person still only has 24 hours in a day.
So a good place to start is by writing better to-do lists, you can see a few of my tips here.
Learn to prioritise
Another great thing to learn is prioritisation. Not everything is urgent and not everything needs to be done immediately.
Some things are more important than others, some things take more time and energy than others. So you need to learn to evaluate what actually matters the most at a specific point in time, and work accordingly.
For more tips on how to prioritise well, read this post.
Schedule everything
Honestly, if you still don’t do this, you need to do it asap.
The reason is because as busy adults, unless something is on our calendars, it’s not happening. And how many times did you forget to do something or did you double-book yourself?
Or how many times did you think you were going to achieve X, Y, and Z, but didn’t write it down, and when you got to it, you barely made it to the first task?
Scheduling everything will be a lifesaver and another secret to better time management.
Figure out if there’s anything you can integrate
Although I’m not a fan of multitasking and I don’t promote it, I do believe in the power of task integration. That is essentially another word for multitasking, but done in a smart way.
I believe it’s possible to combine tasks that don’t require the same part of our brains so that we can improve our time management and free up more time in our day.
For a full explanation on this and to read some practical examples, read this article.
Take an honest look at your life/career/business and see where you’re wasting your time
This is a very important step and it needs to be taken if you want to be better at time management.
The truth is that a lot of the time we think we’re being productive and we’re always working on something, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting the important things done!
I could easily spend hours of my day doing research and learning more about my field; and whilst I believe research and learning are very important, I don’t think I need to do that every day.
I’ll be better off actually writing more blogs, or improving the ones already out, or driving more traffic to my blog.
Do you see what I mean?
And the same goes for my personal life.
I could definitely go to the shops every day and buy fresh food to cook on the day, but is that a smart idea? Unfortunately not.
Bearing in mind it wouldn’t be a wise choice financially, it also doesn’t make a lot of sense because I have more important things to do. So instead, I do my big shop twice a month, cook for two weeks at a time, and save TONS of time.
Related articles to improve time management
The importance of time management – Final thoughts
To summarise this article, I really believe that mastering time management will be life-changing for you.
I hope these 9 benefits I shared in this post will help you understand why I’m so passionate about it. And I hope the 5 tips I shared in the last part of the post, will help you become a time management pro!
