Top Time Management Techniques: Functionality, Pros, Cons, What it fixes

Whether in professional or personal endeavours, time management has a vital role to play in boosting your overall productivity. Time management techniques help you understand how much time you spend on one particular task and how you can utilise that time in other ways. 

Being overwhelmed with work pressure and lacking time and organisation is common in professional spaces. As over 44% of employees feel frustrated due to work-related stress on their jobs, it is crucial to understand that lousy time management is one of the leading causes of this issue.

This is when time management methods come in handy. 

Implementing expert-curated time management techniques objectively sorts out your work schedule while offering practical ways to accomplish chores.

Let’s dive into the world of effective time management techniques to enhance your work-life balance!

What are time management techniques? 

Time management techniques comprise a set of rules and principles that assists people in regulating daily tasks, following a healthy and productive balance across all life sphere. 

Time management techniques allow you to learn a judicious use of time to evaluate, segment and implement duties at hand. Following this set of techniques is bound to bring you short and long-term results with active participation and implementation in your daily life. 

The primary objectives of time management practices are: 

• Writing down what to do today
• Working on high-priority tasks 
• Having sufficient time for breaks
• Managing stress and team simultaneously
• Tracking projects and identifying their weaknesses

Time management techniques require solid time management skills to function efficiently. This would improve your time management style and would restore your work-life balance. 

Time management skills 

Time management skills might sound similar to time management techniques, but it is widely different. Time management skills include several exercises one can perform to reach their desired goal. Here, we have listed some vital time management skills to boost productivity. 

• Setting up SMART goals: Setting up SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals is one of the best time management skills. These goals help you understand the needs of your work and how they can be achieved within a minimal time. 
• Planning effectively: Efficient and effective planning helps you have clear objectives for your work. It defines tasks and resources to make a concrete plan for your goals. 
• Managing stress: Managing stress is a significant time management skill. This helps you to map out analytical strategies and feel more relaxed while working. Since your health directly impacts your productivity, paying attention to this skill is essential. 
• Delegating the tasks properly: Delegating tasks can reduce the burden and evenly distribute duties among employees for optimum efficiency. 
• Avoiding distractions: Distractions often eat away your time. Avoiding distractions can assist you in managing your tasks efficiently, letting you work in a relaxed manner. 
• Focusing on one task: Single-tasking prioritises quality over quantity, which is beneficial in the long run if you’re aiming towards improved quality and efficiency. 
• Knowing to say no: This time management skill would help you to straighten your priorities and manage time efficiently. 
• Beating procrastination: This time management skill will help you cut down on procrastination and help you finish work within the estimated time. 

Best Time Management Techniques 

Time management skills apparently boost your productivity to achieve and cultivate results in the long run. However, it cannot be done without proper planning and methods. Here we have listed out a few time management methods with advantages and disadvantages that would help you choose wisely.

1. Pomodoro 

Pomodoro consists of breaking up your work with a 25-minute working session and a 5-minute break. After every four cycles, you take up a 20-minute break. 

How it works: Pomodoro helps you manage your work and breaks, improving your scheduling and enhancing your multitasking skills. 

What it fixes: Ability to concentrate, improves multitasking skills and missing deadlines. 

Advantages: Timely estimates your work, helps you focus and easily tracks profitability. 

Disadvantage: Following the fixed intervals could be counterproductive. 

2. Kanban 

It is a visual time management technique that tracks your project progress. It also helps in increasing productivity and efficiency in the manufacturing timeline. 

How it works: It can be used with project management software as it tracks your tasks in different columns. It determines the stages of your tasks and segregates them accordingly. 

What it fixes: Ineffective scheduling, missing deadlines and multitasking. 

Advantages: Provides a robust visible representation and customised principles according to your needs. 

Disadvantages: It does not help much in terms of priority or urgency; challenging to predict the progress without a proper time component. 

3. Gettings Things Done 

This time management technique helps you to brainstorm your tasks efficiently with a simple to-do list. 

How it works: This technique helps you Capture, Clarify, Organise, Reflect and Engage your tasks and provides an effective solution to manage your time. 

What it fixes: Ineffective scheduling. 

Advantages: Keeps tasks in perspective and boosts your productivity. 

Disadvantages: Does not minimise distractions, unhelpful to people who are prone to parse tasks in projects. 

4. Eat That Frog 

Developed by Brian Tracy, this helps you prioritise your tasks by tackling the worst, most complex tasks at first. Once you finish the worst task, it will help you move on with your day without the stress of resolving it.

How it works: This works by segregating the tasks to improve productivity. The worst task would be prioritised and should be finished within a day. 

What it fixes: Multitasking and missing deadlines. 

Advantages: Makes other tasks easily accomplished, provides motivation and energy, and makes choosing priorities easier. 

Disadvantages: A demoralising start of the day; it could be considered rigid and impractical. 

5. Timeboxing 

Created by James Martin, this technique helps you to do activities within a specified period and then pause the task once the time runs out. 

How it works: Finish your tasks within a specified period and stop once the time is up. 

What it fixes: Ineffective scheduling, missing deadlines and skipping breaks. 

Advantages: Helpful for many small tasks, helps adhere to deadlines, does not allow multitasking. 

Disadvantages: It could be very counterproductive, and wrong calculations can prove ineffective. 

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Which one should you pick? 

The best way to pick your choice of time management technique would be to analyse the nature of your work. Pay special attention when evaluating benefits and disadvantages since a wrong choice can backfire to trouble your work-life balance. 

The above time management techniques are considered some of the most primal and effective time management methods. From regulating office work to balancing leisure time at home, these time management techniques are accurately curated to target diverse settings with their expert-led principles guide. 

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If you are looking for personal and professional development and creating a positive work culture in your organisation, check out upGrad’s Executive Post Graduate Programme in Human Resources Management course. 

The course is hybrid and is specifically designed for working professionals. There are more than 8 case studies and assignments which would improve your executive skills and time management. While working on this course, you will also get to work on various Capstone projects to boost your skillset significantly.