My Time Management Hacks

The new year always brings a renewed passion for productivity. I don’t know what it is, but I try really hard to find new ways to manage my time. Working in marketing, I’ve become very used to managing a million things at a time; however, there is always room for improvement. Over the years, I’ve taken on a few different techniques and I wanted to break down my top 3 time management hacks!

Hack #1: The 4 Quadrants 

I learned this hack while at my last agency job. The idea is you split your to-do list into 4 quadrants. The top left is where you put your urgent & important tasks; these tasks are the fire drills, crises or deadline driven tasks. The top right is where you put your not urgent & important tasks; these are your strategy or planning tasks. The bottom left is where you put your urgent, not important tasks; these are the interruptions and random tasks the bosses LOVE to throw at you. The bottom right is where you put your not urgent, not important tasks; these are the nice to have tasks that don’t have a time table. 

This is a great visual for you to focus on what is important and focus your energy appropriately. 

Hack #2: Time Blocks 

One of the biggest lessons I learned in 2020 was setting boundaries and this definitely includes your time. If it were up to all of the bosses I’ve ever had, 90% of my time would be spent in meetings. And, when you are balancing 5+ different job titles while managing a team, meetings are the biggest time suck. 

So, what I do now is use out of office time blocks when I am working on important tasks or projects. What this does is prevent anyone from scheduling over the time I have carved out for my work. 

Hack #3: Put Away the Phone 

This one is so simple but SO effective. It’s pretty self explanatory, but any time I have a big strategy I need to build out or am on a big deadline, I put my phone in another room and get to work. You honestly don’t realize how much you open your phone out of habit, so this allows you to stay focused on your big rocks.