Time is our most precious commodity in a day. Knowing how to manage your time at work is therefore essential if you want to avoid feeling overwhelmed and inefficient. We’ve all had days with an unfinished to-do list and the frustration that goes with it. We can feel frustrated at not having accomplished all our tasks, think we’re useless, and get depressed as the weeks go by because of this lack of time.

Learning to manage your time well can help your days run more smoothly, with a sense of accomplishment. And there are time management techniques to help you do just that. That’s what we’re going to look at in this article.

TAKING STOCK OF YOUR TIME AT WORK
You can only correct what you know well. So the first thing you need to do to manage your working time is to get to know your working hours. Analyzing your working time will enable you to organize your time during the day wisely. You’ll only get an overall view of your organization if you take a precise stock.

The first thing to do is to list your most common tasks and measure the time spent on each of them. To do this, you can use a time management tool like Toggl. This tool lets you list blocks of time according to your tasks, and measure the time spent on each of them. Thanks to a detailed report, you’ll have a complete picture of the breakdown of your working hours by task. It’s a great way to make adjustments.

ORGANIZE YOUR TIME WISELY: A SCHEDULE FOR BETTER TIME MANAGEMENT
Without organization, you have no control. To organize your time as effectively as possible, you need a daily schedule, not just a to-do list. Your schedule enables you to measure the time devoted to each of the actions you need to carry out. By organizing your schedule, you’ll quickly see what you can do in a day, and what actions you need to postpone.

Having a schedule allows you to manage your time efficiently: at 9:00 a.m., you know what you have to do, and you get on with it. You don’t have to worry about what you’re going to do next: it’s all written down. A schedule also lets you measure the time spent on a task, so you can see if you’ve underestimated the time you need to devote to it. It’s a good way of getting a precise idea of the time spent on a task, so you can make adjustments. It’s also a good way of setting yourself time limits for completing a task.

It’s essential to include breaks in your schedule to allow you to take a breather, but also time to deal with urgent and unforeseen tasks. This allows you to deal with the unexpected that may arise during the working day. And it helps you prioritize important tasks.

PRIORITIZE THE MOST IMPORTANT TASKS WISELY

Make a list of your tasks and plan them.
Not all the tasks you need to accomplish have the same degree of importance. And when you’re overwhelmed, it can seem like the opposite: everything becomes urgent and important. It’s essential to take a step back and assess the importance of each task in your day, or even in your week.

To do this, you can rank your tasks according to their degree of importance: the most important first. For each one, ask yourself: “Is it more important than the next? This will give you a clear overview of your priorities. Noting how much time you’ll need for each task can help you spread them out over the day or week. You’ll see more clearly which tasks have priority. In fact, you should always start your day with an important task. It will give you the satisfaction of having accomplished something important in your day.

This will give you an overview of similar tasks, so you can group them together.

GROUPING SIMILAR TASKS
Every time you change tasks, your brain has to adapt. You need time to concentrate before you’re fully efficient. If you chain together actions that are completely different from each other, you spend a lot of energy. By grouping similar tasks in the same time slot, you become more efficient. Organizing your work sessions according to task category makes for better time management at work.

For example, you can group together everything to do with your e-mails: reading them, replying to them, filing them, forwarding them to a colleague. By focusing on this action, you avoid spreading yourself too thin, become more productive and spend less time on it. A rule that will help you enormously: if the answer takes less than 2 minutes, write it immediately. This will save you precious time: read the e-mail, put yourself in context, write the reply. If you postpone replying to the e-mail, you’ll be doing the same thing several times: reading the e-mail again, putting yourself back in context. So less than 2 minutes = immediate response.

INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY: AVOID MULTITASKING
Every time you change task types, your brain needs to adapt. You then need a certain amount of time to be at your most efficient. Multitasking prevents you from being fully effective. If you devote yourself 100% to one task, your efficiency is close to 100%. As soon as you start to disperse yourself on a second task, you’re down to 80% efficiency. And the more things you do at once, the less efficient you become.

When you plan your working hours, grouping tasks in the same category helps you to be more efficient. When you’re managing your mailbox, do just that for a given period of time. When you’re working on a file, don’t answer your e-mails, don’t answer the phone. Concentrating for the duration of the task will enable you to complete it more quickly.

DECOMPRESS REGULARLY TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE

Sometimes all you need to do is take a walk for a few minutes to decompress.
When we’re struggling to manage our time effectively, we think that working more will help. We refuse to give ourselves breaks: there’s no time! except that our brain can’t stay active all the time. It needs breaks. And the same goes for our nervous system.

So it’s vital to take time for yourself, to recharge your batteries. Working non-stop means always being in warrior mode; you can’t do it all day long. The ideal is to have regular decompression periods. To do activities that give us pleasure, without any particular objective. In fact, that’s the first thing we should be planning in our diaries: breaks, vacations, moments to recharge our batteries.

And that means learning to say no to certain tasks.

DARE TO SAY NO TO AVOID WASTING TIME
You can’t do everything! Thinking you have to say yes to every request is the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By taking stock of your working time, you’ll have identified the tasks you can give up: to delegate, or even eliminate. So you can devote your time to the things that really count.

We often think that saying yes to everything gives us the image of a professional who masters everything, who knows everything, who is capable of solving everything. But by taking on so many different tasks, you can end up spreading yourself too thin, and even botching some important ones. Your time is precious, and saying “no” means preserving it. Saying no to others means learning to say yes to yourself. It means freeing up time for more important activities, or even rest periods. It also means learning to earn respect.

Take the time to think before you accept: is this my responsibility? Do I have the time for it? Is it a priority?

ORGANIZING YOUR WORKSPACE

Having an empty desk eliminates distractions.
If it’s a mess on your desk, it’s often a mess in your head too. It’s harder to concentrate if you have a multitude of distractions in your field of vision. A well-organized workspace helps you see things more clearly, and saves you time. It helps you avoid searching for documents and being distracted by unimportant files. The space in which you work can be a source of distraction, or a place where you spend your time efficiently.

To organize your workspace, keep only the essentials: your phone (if you need to be reachable), the file you’re working on, a notebook with tasks to complete. Remove anything that might distract you: the latest magazine, next week’s file, post-it notes. The more free space you have, the fewer sources of distraction you have, and the more you can concentrate.

IDENTIFY DISTRACTIONS AND REMOVE THEM
Our attention span is constantly shrinking. And the more distractions we have, the more tempted we are to leave what we’re doing. Our brains are constantly looking for pleasure. So it’s tempting to go and check your social networks rather than work on that big project. To give yourself the best chance of staying focused, remove distractions.

Remove notifications: e-mails, social networks, messaging, etc.
Tidy up your desk to avoid visual attractions (the catalog for the next vacation, how tempting!)
Use concentration tools like pomodoro (25 minutes concentration and 5 minutes break).
To manage your time well, you need to make sure you’re focused. Searching for a file for 10 minutes wastes your time. A tidy, well-organized space will save you a lot of time. No more hours searching for that piece of paper with an important note on it.

By eliminating distractions, you give yourself every chance of working with concentration, and therefore saving time.

RESPECT YOUR OWN RHYTHM
We all have different rhythms: some people are more productive in the morning, others in the evening. Knowing your rhythm will help you manage your time more effectively. You’ll learn how to better manage your time according to your energy. Learn to identify the times when you’re most productive. And organize your work to respect these rhythms.

I’m most productive in the morning. It’s a time when I have a clear head and can work on important files, write and concentrate. So I know how to organize my work while respecting my rhythms. This makes me more productive, and I save time on my tasks. Some days, I know I have less energy, so I take advantage of it to do less important tasks. That keeps me going in spite of everything.

LEARN TO DELEGATE
You can’t do everything, and you especially can’t do everything perfectly. By learning to delegate, you can concentrate on the tasks you know how to do perfectly. Of course you know how to do the other tasks, but does it really matter if you’re the one who writes up the minutes of the last meeting?

Refusal to delegate can also conceal a desire for control: you want to do everything in order to master everything. Learning to delegate will help you let go of this desire for control, and it will help you relax. One of my friends understood this: she agreed to let her assistant do certain tasks so that she could concentrate on others. Not only did she save time, but she also made her assistant feel valued.

Managing working time requires a bit of discipline at first, and involves asking yourself certain questions. But it’s essential if you’re to approach each day with greater peace of mind.

Improving your time management is a skill that can be learned. These ten tips for managing your time well and becoming more productive are to be implemented gradually.