Time Management Best Practices: Tips for Staying Focused – Media Cause

Time Management Best Practices

On a regular busy day of making a difference, we often find ourselves juggling many different activities. It’s easy in that situation to fall into a “put out the hottest fire” trap–becoming the proverbial dog chasing every squirrel that shoots into your field of view (or in this case, every email that hits your inbox, or every Slack notification that disrupts your mojo). You may find that by 5pm, you haven’t even scratched the surface on what you planned to accomplish. Before you know it, you’re putting in time finishing up your workday in the evening when you should be streaming that new show you like.

If you let your impulse to answer every ping immediately as it happens guide your day, it can multiply the time it takes to get things done.  There are, of course, some situations where there’s something time critical that needs your immediate attention to meet deadlines — so fair warning, everything I’m about to say isn’t for those situations! Do that when you need to, but don’t make it your constant MO. Under normal everyday circumstances, here are some ways I’ve found that can help you stay focused throughout the day, manage your time effectively, and give yourself the beautiful gift of structure and accomplishment:

Make Workblocks

Turn notifications off

Bundle tasks together

Evaluate those wonderful and pesky meetings

Finding the right tactics for managing your precious work time is also a matter of figuring out what works best for you. And from experience, it’s hard to do consistently! Even though I know these methods help me work most efficiently, days can be random and full of the unexpected — things that can throw you back into not-so-great habits like watching a team Slack channel incessantly for an update instead of just focusing on other things you need to do, and that’s OK!

Those are the times when reminding yourself what it’s all about—doing good work for a good cause—can help refocus your mindset  all of the work needs to get done, and inspire you to get back into good discipline with your time management.

It’s all about owning your workday instead of letting the workday own you.