It’s easy to let your day get away from you. Before you know it, it’s quitting time, and you’ve spent all eight hours doing busywork without making any progress. Good time management is all about prioritizing what’s important.

Why Is It Important

It’s easy to stay busy and feel productive. Getting things accomplished and making progress is a different story. That’s why good time management skills are important. You need to know where to spend your time most effectively TODAY to make the most progress. Master this, and you’ll do well at school, work, or in running your own business.

How To Get Started

The best place to start is to pay attention to where you’re spending your time. Keep a journal and start jotting down what you’re doing at any given time during your workday. At the end of the day review what you’ve done and evaluate what was productive and what wasn’t.

It also helps to have a list of high-value tasks. These are the items you should be working on the hardest. It could be studying for your finals, researching new products to offer, or making client calls. Think about what your most valuable tasks are and write them down. Then start making more time for them. These tasks will be different from person to person and will change over time.

Improving Your Skills

To improve your time management skills, get in the habit of scheduling your day. That could be as simple as a short to-do list that has your most important tasks for the day on it, or it could be as involved as scheduling your entire day with time blocked out for each important task. Try out a few different time management systems and planners, always focus on spending as much time as possible on your most valuable tasks. Reviewing your time journal and getting back in the habit of tracking how you’re regularly spending your time can also be helpful. The end goal is to continue to increase your productivity.