How Successful People Manage Their Time

It’s easy to look at a successful person’s accomplishments, and attribute it to unchangeable factors such as luck. However, successful people have reached their station in life primarily through the proper use of the most important resource in their life: their time.

The tips below will help make better use of the hours that are available in a day.

They set goals and break them into manageable chunks

Most projects seem intimidating at the outset,  which results in procrastination and analysis paralysis by many employees. By setting simple, concrete goals that are well-defined, and then breaking them down into manageable chunks, real progress can be realized from day to day.

Just because an employee can do a specific job doesn’t mean they should be doing it. If there is another employee in a department or an external contractor that can take on a task that is of low overall importance, it should be delegated to them. This frees up the higher-skilled employees to spend their time on executing tasks of greater value, increasing their effectiveness and moving the project along at a greater rate of speed.

They embrace the concept of minimum effective load

When it comes to any task, a small amount of overall effort is responsible for the lion share of the desired effect. This relationship is described perfectly in the Pareto principle,  which states that 80% or more of a wanted or unwanted effect stems from 20% or less of the causes.

A good example of this relates to the times of the day when an employee is most effective; whether it is in the morning, afternoon, or in the evening, they should conduct their highest value tasks during the time when they have the most energy, and not when habits developed in the past dictate it.

They focus 100% of their energies on the task in front of them

An unfortunate tendency that many workers have developed over the past generation is that they attempt to multi-task, as it creates the illusion that they are getting a lot of work done. Despite this perception, studies have shown that multitasking slows down the overall pace of work flow,  rather than quickening its pace.

When working on a project, focusing on a single task at a time with all of one’s attention will result in higher productivity per person, rather than splitting one’s attention over multiple files and folders.