Here’s an idea that could take you 5 minutes to consider, which could then save you 5 hours.
Identify your bad habits and act on them – we all have bad habits in our time management and they change over time. These could include:
- Doing the easy tasks first, whilst leaving the harder but more important tasks until later, which then may become more complex and take longer.
- Inefficient filing, meaning that when you come to do a task it takes extra time to find the document.
- Taking too long over a document, by checking it and re-checking it over and over.
- being distracted by email which mean it takes longer to get back into the task you were doing.
Taking five minutes once a month to reflect on the bad habits we have developed, can be an effective way of improving our time management. Even small bad habits like procrastination, (putting certain tasks off), responding to even unimportant emails very quickly, and not planning, are all very typical bad habits.
Of course bad is a value judgment and its up to you to decide what is bad. The key point is just to take 5 mins every few weeks to reflect on any bad habits you have developed, which could save you 5 hours if you can change that habit.