Time Management Archives - The Art of Improvement

How to Double Your Productivity

Much like our memory of it, time ebbs and flows; its pacing is irregular and distorted. To make the most out of a day, then, time management is a potent weapon in the fight against unproductivity. Unprioritised, a lack of time management leads to days wasted, incomplete work and damaged self-esteem.

It can feel difficult to manage your time for optimum productivity – errands, work, and travelling are things most people do frequently that eat into the day. However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Developing an efficient method for managing time is the easiest way to hack your internal system and maximise productivity. That starts with the simple tips the rest of this article will outline.

5 Time Management Tips to Work Smarter, Not Harder

In the 1930’s, Allen Morgenstern coined the phrase, “Work smarter, not harder.” This was in response to the long and grueling jobs performed by workers at Industrial plants. By coming up with ways to make them more efficient with less effort, they found that productivity increased, and workers were happier.

But how did they do it?

How can one work “smart” rather than “hard”?

Most of us have heard this term, and wonder how that can apply to workers today. There are many ways to increase your productivity by using good time management practices and a few extra tools to batch your tasks, track your time and prioritize what’s most important to you.

Let’s look at 5 time management tips that can help you to work smart, not hard.

Parkinson’s Law: How to Manage Your Time More Effectively

Have you ever been given an assignment for an essay that’s due in a month, but waited until the last few days to write it? Or maybe you’ve had to give a work presentation at the end of the week, but put everything together an hour before you had to give it? Or maybe you’ve set a big goal for yourself to get completed in five years, but don’t seem to be making any progress?

If you’ve ever experienced this kind of procrastination, you’ve experienced Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law is a theory developed by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in an essay published in The Economist in 1955. Cyril wrote his essay after spending a lot of time in the British Civil Service where he noticed tasks took up as much time as they were allotted.