By mbretous@hubspot.com (Martina Bretous)

It’s late and you’re working on a project that’s due soon.

You feel overwhelmed by your tasks and aren’t quite sure how you got here. You make a self-promise to resolve this issue but you don’t know how, so the cycle continues.

Consider this your WebMD diagnosis: You’re likely struggling with bad time management.

The good news is, time management is a learned skill. By following the tips below, written with cross-functional teams in mind, you can be on your way to getting back control of your time and working efficiently.

What can time management skills help a person do?

Time management is necessary for a successful personal and professional life.

When you manage your time well, you can be more productive and efficient. You have a solid understanding of what each task requires and you can plan accordingly.

It allows you to maximize your time and perform better.

Managing your time well also helps you produce high-quality work. When we struggle with this skill, we often rush to complete our tasks and can easily feel overwhelmed.

1. Learn your pattern of productivity.

Everyone has a different productivity pattern.

We’ve long separated people into two categories: Morning people and night people. However, there are many more facets to productivity.

Perhaps you’re more efficient during short sprints of focus, following the Pomodoro technique. Or you might prefer knocking out your top priorities in one stretch.

Find out what makes you most productive and use that to your advantage. If you notice you’re most productive in the early morning, use that time to cross your focus-heavy, high-priority tasks off your to-do list.

Building your work schedule around your natural patterns will make it easier for you to focus and be more efficient in your workflow.

2. Prioritize your tasks.

Name a better feeling than crossing something off a to-do list.

There’s something about completing a task that fills you with a sense of accomplishment and builds momentum.

My colleague and marketing manager for Channel Promotions at HubSpot, Jennifer Kim, calls written to-do lists her holy grail.

“At the beginning of each day, I like to take the time to manually write out what tasks I need to complete for the day,” she says. “It’s key for me to write out tasks manually versus typing them out because I’m able to get a better sense of what tasks will take the most time and what I need to prioritize as well as mentally get myself in the headspace to take each one on.”

She then cross-references this list with her Google Calendar to plan out her day.

Now that you have every task written out, how do you decide what to tackle first? Meg Prater, senior manager of the Marketing, Sales, and Service blogs at HubSpot, has some advice.

“I prioritize based on impact to the business. Is there a planning meeting with our VP? The prep work for that should probably come first in my week when I’m …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron