Words of Whizdom

These tried-and-true time management hacks will help make it easier to stay productive each and every day.

Stop multitasking! Focus on a single task at a time. Despite the fact that multitasking has been popularized as a sign of high intelligence and/or mental capacity, multitasking is actually a wasteful way to work. You will achieve more if you choose one activity at a time.

Use a calendar every day. There is the risk of forgetting some events if you depend on your memory to markdown activities. The ineffectiveness of using the head to plan and keep track of events is the reason why successful people use calendar tools. Be it a physical calendar notebook or a digital, like Google Calendar, being able to check and see how your week ahead is scheduled is very useful.

Ignore your inbox as long as possible. You might not know it, but your inbox is full of distractions. When you should be focusing on your work, you will instead be drafting responses in your head, thinking about how many emails there are and how long it will take to answer them. Save the inbox until the middle or end of the day if at all possible.

Take advantage of when your energy is at its peak. There are a set of hours where you are likely to do your best work. For some people, it is at night. Identify yours, and if you have the power to shift your schedule around, try to use your window of energy effectively. This period of time could be the best time to handle a challenging project. Other times, it is a great time to get all the easy stuff out of the way so you can really focus on the hard stuff. Decide the best version of this productivity hack that works best for your personality and the way you work.

Batch process your work. Don't jump back and forth between lots of little jobs. Dedicate large, seamless chunks of your day to handling specific tasks or projects. Only switch to a new task when you are done with the previous task for the entire day. You will get so much more done, and you will reduce the amount of time each day you spend feeling out of touch.

Avoid unnecessary tasks and avoid procrastination. Successful people are not only great at handling important tasks, but they are also great at knowing which tasks to avoid. Sometimes you have to do unnecessary things in the course of your workday, but frequently you can get out of them. Don't be afraid to walk up to your boss and explain why a task is unnecessary if you know for certain that it is. Don't phrase it as a complaint. Just explain an alternate approach which would be faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective. Also, avoid procrastination. It doesn't get the job done, it only multiplies it, and you find that the time you should have used to achieve that particular task is used doing noting or something without substance.

Learn to let other people do things for you. It is impossible to do everything yourself, so you shouldn't think about it. Effective managers and successful employees routinely delegate tasks so they can focus on their work better. You need to be able to figure out when someone else is better suited to work on a certain task. The steps to effective delegation are: describe the task and deadline, explain it to the person you are delegating to and ask to be kept informed.

You would be more productive in your daily life if you adhere to these hacks.

 Good luck!  Work Smarter, Not Harder