5 ways to do everything today to do more tomorrow

2023 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-07-28 10:38

Identify the most urgent tasks and complete them at the peak of your activity.

1. Rethink your daily routine

Find and eliminate all the factors that are wasting your precious time. Start tracking how you use your business hours and minutes. Fortunately, there are tools that help collect personal statistics from your gadgets.

Keep in mind that every time you get distracted, it takes you 23 minutes to refocus on work tasks. This is a huge waste of time. Therefore, before you get down to business, you must minimize any distraction. Clear your desktop, set up a Do Not Disturb schedule, answer all messages before diving into head-to-head work.

2. Find your peak time

Do you know what time of day you are most productive? If you have never thought about it, it is not surprising that you do not have time for anything.

For most people, productivity peaks between 8 am and 12 am. In addition, those who get up earlier are smaller than N. L. Digdon, A. J. Howell. College students who have an eveningness preference report lower self-control and greater procrastination / Chronobiology International are prone to procrastination.

Define your own schedule based on what time of day you are most energetic and active. All the most difficult tasks that require one hundred percent concentration must be completed when your energy reaches its peak. This will help you achieve more with less time.

3. Get the most bang for your buck

Think of time not as a given, but as a resource that you invest in creating a product. Estimate its real value and decide if X is worth doing if it takes you at least 30 minutes.

Optimizing your work will save resources and energy and give you more free time tomorrow. Here's what you need to do for this:

• Plan. Decide what needs to be done today and what can wait. Try to organize your schedule so that you do fewer things, but concentrate only on the most important tasks.
• Automate. Let your computer, smartphone and web services do everything for you. Spending a lot of time to clean up your mail? Set up filters. Filling out many of the same electronic forms? Leave it to a dedicated mechanism in your browser or password manager. Use services to automate anything and everything like IFTTT. All this will free up a lot of valuable time.
• Delegate. If you cannot automate a task, but its execution is associated with a lot of time or inconvenience for you, entrust it to assistants, colleagues, or even outsource it. This will allow you to focus on the really important things that you can do yourself.
• Use the calendar. The best way to organize your work is to save all tasks to your calendar. The fact is that it gives a more visual representation of the time than regular to-do lists.

Apply all of the above, and if you can save a couple of hours a day, then consider that you have an extra day in the week.

4. Limit your working hours

Review your routine. If you work more than eight hours a day, limit yourself to six hours and try to complete tasks during that time.

The work fills the time allotted to it. Everyone knows this, which is clear from the proverb: "The more time, the more things to do."

Cyril Northcote Parkinson Military historian, writer, author of Parkinson's Law

By setting a limit, you will be forced to focus on completing the most important tasks. Prioritize and be more efficient with less time. At the same time, free up most of the day to have time to rest and better prepare for tomorrow.

5. Refuse unimportant matters

Most people spend a lot of time on unimportant things like endless calls from colleagues or pointless meetings. Nothing useful is being done, and time is running out.

If you receive a huge number of assignments a day, you must learn to select and filter out the useless ones so that you can focus only on the priority ones.

To get a result, it is important not only to choose what to focus on, but also to understand what needs to be ignored.

Peter Bregman Business Consultant, Author of Books on Self-Development and Time Management

Learn to say no. Many of us are uncomfortable with rejecting others because we don't want to disappoint them. Therefore, use milder forms of refusal: for example, you can tell the interlocutor that you simply do not have enough time to devote yourself to his instructions, and he will most likely understand you.

Only say yes to the most important tasks. Save your time. Consider it as your investment portfolio.