Think about the times you’ve been late for an event or appointment. Think about the times you were supposed to have something completed for work by a certain time and you missed a deadline. When you don’t show up on time or you don’t fulfill your responsibilities, this can lead to a multitude of negative consequences. From missing out on important appointments to getting reprimanded at work, it’s important to avoid poor time management as much as possible.

1. Understanding Time Management

Effective time management is achieved when you have the ability to control every second of a certain time period. If you want better time management in the office, then you would, of course, want to sharpen your skills so you can more efficiently complete your work-related tasks. If you want better time management skills to do things around the house, then you’ll need to sharpen your skills for your at-home activities. With the COVID-19 crisis, millions of people have found themselves working from home. This makes sharpening time management skills for both work- and home-related tasks all the more important. With the right skill set, you can take complete control of every second of every day with proper time management.

To get good with time, you must first have good time perception. More so, you must sharpen your time management skills on a daily basis. Are you ready to learn how to manage time better? If so, check out the tips listed below and keep in mind that now more than ever, the current pandemic is intricately making it a necessity to have the best time management skills you can have.

2. Focus on Quality of Life

It’s great if you can enhance your time management skills to the point that you’re able to increase your income. Let’s say for example that you currently make around $40 an hour with the ability to work 32 hours a week. Using good time management skills, you discover a way to squeeze in eight more hours of work each week, increasing your weekly income by 25%, but you’ve also increased your work hours by 25%. This means you have decreased the amount of time you have to devote to other activities each week by 25% as well. With refined time management, you can find ways to increase your income without decreasing the amount of time to devote to other areas of your life. And this is how you achieve a better quality of life.

3. Set Goals Immediately

Goals are good, but only when you go about setting them the right way. When you fail to set goals immediately, you end up overlooking or misunderstanding the primary target of the goal. If you set a goal right when you pinpoint the need to set it, you are much more likely to achieve it.

4. Wisely Use Fragmented Time Slots

One of the best ways to become better with time management is to make better use of fragmented time slots throughout the day. With so many people working from home due to COVID-19, there has been an increase in the number of meetings taking place via virtual tools. And while virtual tools do make it convenient to attend meetings from home or the office, there becomes a problem when you have day after day of meetings with only 15 to 30 minutes between each one. This leads to multiple fragmented time slots throughout the day, making it nearly impossible to complete your actual work-related goals and duties.

To make the most use out of fragmented time slots, you must be intentional in the tasks you focus on between meetings. 15 minutes might not seem like a lot of time, but it’s enough time to answer emails, make a few phone calls, or even review notes for the next meeting. If you normally find yourself spending an hour a night answering emails, you can easily complete this task during four 15-minute fragmented time slots to make better use of your time.

5. Prioritize Deadlines

Does a feeling of dread or anxiety sweep over you when you think of missing a goal or deadline? Probably so, and these feelings can easily lead to stress in many parts of your life. To keep this from happening, you should always prioritize deadlines. Knowing you will have all tasks completed on time reduces stress, which not only makes it easier to focus on other important things you need to get done but gives you a sense of peace that allows you to complete other tasks faster than you would if you were constantly anxious about an approaching deadline.