Time management hacks: Reduce stress and reclaim your busy days

MANY of us are living increasingly fast-paced and busy lives and are struggling to cope. Here’s how to manage your time better and escape the cult of “super busy'”.

time management

MANY of us are living increasingly fast-paced and busy lives and are struggling to cope. Here’s how to manage your time better and escape the cult of “super busy'”.

FROM busy parents to office workers, or sports players to retirees, just about everyone seems to be “super busy”. Snowed under, overcommitted, overscheduled and overextended — we’re a society thriving on having a lot to do.

I get it; you really are busy. And you want to squeeze each minute from every day.

But increasing productivity is a tricky thing to master, particularly when we humans are hardwired for distraction. Here are six time-management techniques to help you prioritise the things that really matter.

START THE DAY ON A POSITIVE NOTE

Your morning should kick off on the right foot, setting a positive tone that lasts the whole day.

Organise your work wardrobe the night before to save time and stress of co-ordinating an outfit, or tracking down a clean pair of socks. Save your brain power for more important decisions during the day. Next, take a leaf out of US Navy Admiral William McRaven’s book and make your bed. “It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed,” he told university students in a speech that became a viral sensation on online.

Exercising first thing in the morning also sets the whole day off on a high. The health benefits of exercise are obvious, and many studies have proven regular exercise can increase memory retention and thinking skills. Research led by the University of Bristol found exercising during the work week significantly improved people’s moods.

Time management guru Laura Vanderkam says we’re also better off doing the important stuff towards the start of the week, or early in the day.

“Once we start reacting to things like emails or meetings, it’s hard to re-establish focus. But carving out Monday morning for deep work, or an hour at the start of the day for exercise or family time, can really help us make progress over time,” she says.

TAKE SHORTCUTS

Perfectionism destroys productivity and people can be their own worst critics. We all want to achieve exceptional results, but perfectionism can stand in the way of getting things done. The truth is, life and work value outcomes more than perfectionism. Bottom line: It’s better to get something done, than not at all. If you start to look for shortcuts, you’ll start seeing them everywhere.

Demanding professional careers and busy family lives mean sometimes it makes more sense to take shortcuts than attempt to do everything yourself. For example, it might make more sense to buy lunch rather than make it every day. Or opt for something you can eat on the go. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not slaving away in the kitchen churning out homemade meals. Give yourself and break and take shortcuts where you can.

DO ONE THING AT A TIME

There’s a mountain of studies which prove multi-tasking is a fallacy. You are more productive if you concentrate on doing one thing at a time, rather than jumping around from one task to the next, and back again.  

Prioritise your to-do list and work through that list, ticking off each thing as you get it done. That to-do list should be short and realistic; a never-ending list will result in a constant feeling of inescapable failure. The small victory of ticking off each task will motivate you to push through to the finish line. Apps like MinimaList keep you focused by timing each task with a full-screen timer that tells you to keep working if you dare touch your phone.

LEARN TO SAY NO

It sounds like a cliche, but learning to say “no” will free up your busy schedule to make room for the stuff that matters. But saying “no” isn’t always easy; no one wants to feel like they’ve let someone down.

“Too often, when we’re under pressure, and someone asks us to do something that will add to that, we say ‘yes’ because we don’t have the energy to deal with the fallout of saying ‘no’,” self-improvement author Kelly Exeter says. “The simplest way to get around this is to never say ‘yes’ at the moment. Always say ‘let me get back to you’. When you get back to the person, it’s easier to say ‘no, can’t do it’ via an email or message.”

Reflecting on what is really worth our precious time will help prioritise the things that matter.

“Most of us need to take a step back, audit our lives and commitments and figure out which things we’re doing because we actually want to,” she says. “And which things we’re doing simply because everyone else is doing those things and we feel we should being doing them too.”

GIVE YOURSELF A PROPER BREAK

When you’re insanely busy, it can feel tempting to cut your sleep to fit more into the day. But here’s the thing about sleep: It’s actually the key to getting ahead. Get too little and you can be thrown off your game.

A slew of new research from neuroscientists, sleep clinics, health data matching and sleep apps have produced overwhelming evidence that well-rested people are better decision-makers, more productive and generally happier workers.

Recent research backed by the University of Sydney Business School found inadequate sleep, meals missed, and a lack of exercise are sapping Australians of the energy needed for everyday activities, warning Australia is experiencing a “human energy crisis”.

“Sleep is the most underrated productivity tool available to us all,” Ms Exeter says. “If it’s your default mode to operate on very little sleep, all you’re doing is making yourself grumpy and tired.”

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Nutrition and Physical Activity survey, people aged 25 to 64 now average less than eight hours’ sleep a night, which is the minimum number of hours most sleep scientists recommend. A study published in the medical journal Sleep claimed six hours or less of shut-eye could be just as bad as not sleeping at all.

Ms Exeter says exhausted people don’t handle situations as well as they could and end up making more work for themselves in the process of fixing up all their mistakes.

“The more tired you are, the less productive you are and the more you fall behind. Prioritising sleep when things are crazy is the fastest path to catching up,” she says.

STOP PROCRASTINATING

Using your time on this planet wisely is a tricky thing to do when there’s Netflix, a particularly funny Instagram account to look at, or the new season of The Bachelor rolls in.

Productivity specialist and author Scott Stein says we need to be acutely aware of where we spend our time and identify what’s stealing it.

“Quite often these things are not important; they are just time-fillers that make you feel like you are getting things done,” he says. “One tip is to start tracking where you spend your time. You can create a time log and capture what you do every 15 minutes or use an app such as Harvest to track your time for you.  Once you start realising how much time you are losing on unimportant things, you can increase your time and productivity on the things that matter.”

Often procrastination is an avoidance strategy. Everyone has those emails they’d rather not respond to, or that phone call they’re dreading. It’s easier to focus on trivialities (YouTube videos), pointless meetings or responding to non-urgent emails than tackle those uncomfortable tasks.

To overcome this psychological hurdle, allow yourself to procrastinate only once you’ve finished that thing you’re putting off. From there, you can break your day into tiny, easily achievable tasks, rewarding yourself as each thing is accomplished.

Soon you’ll find yourself zipping through that to-do list. You might even find you aren’t as busy as you think, after all.