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Time management is a systematic approach to planning your time, organizing your work and leisure time in order to maximize productivity and achieve your goals. The main idea is to effectively allocate time between different tasks, projects, and activities, ensuring a balance between work, personal life, and leisure. Time management is extremely important in modern life, which is full of hustle and bustle and a constant overload of work. It helps you to achieve greater productivity, reduces stress and helps you to make better use of your limited resource — time.

In our society, unfortunately, people don’t often talk about the art of time management. It’s not “working from 8 to 6 with one lunch break,” and it’s definitely not “being equally productive all the time.” So what exactly is time management?

There are actually a lot of time management techniques. All of them are different and individual, depending on your temperament, area of work, and its volume. Each one is worth trying to see if it will help you and which one suits you best.

1. Pareto Analysis or the 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule is often used to determine the ratio of work to results. Most likely, you’ve heard it before: 80% of the result is achieved with 20% of the effort. This also applies to other indicators, for example, 80% of problems are caused by only 20% of all causes. That is, how it works in time management — you need to identify your priority 20%. When it comes to solving problems, in order not to waste time on all of them, we solve only those that have a greater impact. We need to write out all the factors of influence, evaluate each one and assign them a score, group them by type, and thus highlight what is of primary importance to solve. This is our 20%.

2. The Pomodoro Technique

This technique is to divide the workflow into intervals of hyper-focus and rest. Usually, these are work intervals of 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks in between. Then you take a longer break, about 15-20 minutes. The advantage of this method is that you can modify this technique depending on your wishes (add more time for work, or vice versa for a break). Nowadays, there are many smartphone apps that you can use as a timer, and some of them even block notifications and prevent you from entering another app while you are working.

3. The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a framework for making it easier to prioritize daily tasks. To get started, we need to draw a special table with two columns for “Urgent” and “Non-Urgent” and two rows for ‘Important’ and “Not Important.” Thus, we will have four blocks in total: “Urgent-Important”, “Non-Urgent-Important”, “Urgent-Non-Important”, and “Non-Urgent-Non-Important”. So, when we sort our tasks, we can see in what order we should solve them.

4. Kanban technique

Modern companies are actively using Kanban boards. The main idea of using whiteboards is that we visualize (draw) the entire work process, and therefore it is easier for us to calculate our strength. That is, you can visually see a certain path from the beginning of the task to its completion (for example, “done”, “in progress”, and “completed”). And if you see that you already have several tasks “in progress,” you won’t start new ones, but will finish the ones you’ve already started.

These are just a few of the most popular time management systems and rules. Choose the one that works for you and forget about deadlines, stress at work, or piles of problems. Live for pleasure and always have free time for yourself.