How to Manage Your Time Efficiently

In this post I'll share with you some tips I'm using in order to improve my performance. Hopefully you'll find these tips useful as well.

1. Todo list

You can make your todo list on paper, with an app on your phone, on a whiteboard or any other form you choose. The important thing is that you'll do it! Once you've made the list of your tasks, it's time to prioritize them.

2. Prioritize

Once you have all your tasks organized in a list, it's time to decide which task is more urgent and has higher priority. This task could be very challenging, but it also the most critical one, so do this carefully.

Some questions that could help you decide which tasks have higher priorities:

Is there a task which is a bottleneck? A bottleneck task is such that other tasks are waiting for it's completion.

Are there any tasks that are critical to be completed today?

Are there any tasks that someone is waiting for it's results or deliverables?

3. Follow up

At the beginning and end of each working day, go over you todo list. Scratch out the tasks you've completed and update tasks priorities, if they've changed. You'll probably have new tasks added everyday and these might change the priorities of the other tasks.

4. Overview

At the end of each week, take a look at your list and see if you managed to complete everything on your list. If you see that in more than 3 consecutive weeks you were not able to complete more than 70% of your tasks, it is time for reassessment. It is a sign that you need to either invest more time or reduce your workload.

In the following posts I will discuss additional tips on how to increase your performance.