Summary: Don’t have time to get everything done at work each day? Try these 8 tips that will help you save time.
Quite often, people are boasting about how busy they are these days. People are taking on more and more: having families, working extra hours, making plans with friends and family, and taking on outside projects, volunteer activities and side businesses. With everything on our plates, how do we make it all work without driving ourselves crazy? If you find yourself wishing there were several more hours in each day, here are some time-saving tips that will help you better manage your schedule and make more time for yourself and loved ones as well.
- Call people. You might avoid calling because you think it will take a lot of your time, but a quick phone call can often save a lot of confusion or a long back and forth email or text chain. If you like having the email evidence, take notes from your call in your email and send it to yourself to file away.
- Focus on one task at a time. People these days think they’re pros at multitasking, but in truth we get a lot more done if we focus on one task at a time. Pick one thing and work on it until you can’t get any further and then move on to something else. Don’t go back and forth or you’ll lose your focus.
- Cut back on social media. We all know it: social media is a time-suck. While we love keeping up with our friends, your life would probably be a lot calmer and more productive if you didn’t look at it at all. While that may seem extreme, consider only looking at your favorite apps once a day and limiting that time. You might find that you don’t miss it.
- Disable phone notifications. Another phone tip, get rid of all of those notifications. When your phone buzzes every few minutes or even hours from social media or email notifications, your thoughts are constantly being pulled away from what you’re doing. Shut them down and only allow notifications for emails from certain people, like your boss, if you need to do so.
- Set calendar reminders. Rather than just having your calendar send you notifications for an event, you can put tasks in your calendar for a certain day or time and have it remind you to get it done. This way you can remind yourself about a report that’s due months away or an email you need to send in a couple weeks by simply setting a reminder and not think about it until the time comes.
- Use canned responses. If you send the same email out to several people but with small changes, such as their name, try canned responses. With these you can save the email text and automatically populate it when you’re sending a new email. You can save several canned responses and keep them as long as you want.
- Set time limits on meetings. Before you even get started, make sure everyone knows that the meeting will only last an hour. Be sure to keep everyone moving along the agenda without getting sidetracked and you’ll save yourself from sitting in a meeting all afternoon.
- Delegate. While you may want to have control by doing everything yourself, you’ll get to a point where you just can’t do it all. Find some people that you trust and delegate things to them. You’ll lower your stress and free up time for more important things.