You cannot make more time, but you can feel like there is more time in your life by using an effective time management worksheet. This type of worksheet helps you to plan your day, week or month and filter out all the unnecessary noise, giving you time to focus on what is truly important.

Finding the right time management worksheet for you is critical in managing your time effectively, both in your personal and professional life. By getting your work done on time, you eliminate unnecessary stress, are looked up to by your peers and have more time to spend doing what you love

Benefits of Managing Your Time

There are many reasons you need a time management worksheet to help you manage your time more effectively. Here are some of the benefits you’ll enjoy by learning to manage your time:

• Freedom
• Simplicity
• Improvement of your reputation
• Opportunity
• Less time wasted
• More free time gained
• Less friction
• Fewer errors
• Accomplish more
• Reduced stress

A great time management worksheet allows you to budget your time so you have the most quality time to dedicate to important things. Excellent time management skills also simplify your life. Who wouldn’t want to do something the easy way? A good manager of time will be regarded as highly reliable in both his personal and professional life. Your boss will come to you with more responsibilities, which may lead to a promotion or better title. This extra responsibility will not be a detriment because you are a master of your time.

The best time management worksheet allows you to use your time more efficiently. A slight adjustment in the time you leave for work could turn a 90-minute one-way commute into a 30-minute one. That is 10 extra hours a week to weed your garden or teach your child how to play an instrument. By planning and preparing your day, week or month, you avoid unnecessary stress in life. A little quality time management goes a long way in managing unnecessary friction in your personal and professional life.

The more organized you are in managing your time, the fewer mistakes you will make; which results in spending less time re-doing your work. Planning your day before you start it will also ensure you do not forget something crucial, like the donuts you promised for after your kid’s soccer practice.

Being able to manage your workload better and knowing when to delegate tasks to others allows you to be more productive, which leads to positive feelings and mitigates negative feelings. Also, knowing exactly what is coming eliminates stressful surprises and difficult, tight deadlines and leaves you better prepared for the curve balls live throws you.

Tips for Effective Time Management

Time management worksheets are a great tool to manage your time effectively, but there are lots of other tips.

 

1. Know Your Goals

Know short-term and long-term you want to accomplish in your life. Write these goals down, how you will accomplish them and when you will accomplish milestones to reach these goals. Knowing what you want will help you do things that will bring you closer to your goals. By not spending time on things that will take you farther from achieving your goals, you will accomplish them faster which leads to fulfillment, satisfaction, self-worth and happiness.

 

2. Prioritize

Classify your tasks. Important and urgent tasks are those which must be done first. Then, take care of the important things that are not urgent. Next, delegate urgent tasks which are unimportant. These tasks distract you from the important tasks which actually need to get done. Finally, put off tasks that are neither important nor urgent. Check out further articles on how to manage multiple priorities.

 

3. Just Say No

Putting off non-urgent, unimportant tasks leads us to our third tip for effective time management. Know when to say no. One of the hardest life lessons is that of sunk cost. No matter how much of a resource (like time) you sink into a project, if it is going nowhere, cut your losses and move on. Remember your bottom line. If you are trying to lose weight and you had a cocktail, you only hurt yourself more by having another cocktail. Similarly, do not spend 12 hours learning how to code script for a video game when you could be using that time to exercise or watch football. Remember, delegate the work it does not make sense for you to do.

 

4. Plan Ahead

Goal setting worksheets are great for helping you to plan ahead. If you are a night owl, take 15 minutes to delineate what needs to get done tomorrow or next week to get you closer to your goals. A clear idea for the most pressing matters of the day saves you time wondering what to do next or performing a task unrelated to your goal. If you are an early riser, work on your to-do list over your cup of morning coffee or juice. This may be the most productive, time-effective thing you do all day.

 

5. Focus

With our phones alerting us constantly of e-mails, Twitter mentions, SMS messages, and Facebook notifications, we can check our phones 150 times per day. However, that is not productive. Own your phone and your email. Do not allow your phone or email to own you. While at work, keep your cell phone on your person in case of an emergency, but turn it off. If someone needs to reach you, they can call your landline at work.

 Otherwise, it can wait until your lunch break. While not at work, pick a dedicated time to check your e-mail and social media so it does not consume your life. Track how many times you are interrupted each day and see what you can do to mitigate such distractions. Maybe this means asking your oldest child to watch the younger siblings while you try to accomplish a task. Maybe it means using an extension to prevent your web browser from showing you pages unrelated to your work like Reddit or Instagram. Sometimes, we distract ourselves but there are still ways to mitigate this.

 

6. Relax

Relaxing ties in with focusing. You cannot accomplish anything when you are stressed. Break your work up into small, manageable chunks. If you are manually keying hand-written budgets into Google Sheets, try the (10+2)*5 method. In other words, work for 10 minutes, then give yourself a two-minute break. The work you do in the 50 total minutes of that hour will be much more effective than if you spend most of the time dreading your work and wondering when it will be over.

Another example of breaking your projects into manageable chunks is the Pomodoro Technique. The idea is, you work for 25 minutes and take a 5 minute break. After four periods of work, you are allowed a 15-minute break. You can also adjust the timer to suit your needs.

 

7. Self-Care

Similar to relaxing, taking care of yourself is a great time management technique. Getting at least nine hours of sleep per night and 2.5 hours of moderate exercise weekly ensures your mind and body are in tip-top shape. A well-rested, healthy individual will always get more done than the sedentary one who pulls frequent all-nighters or sleeps only a few hours per night.

10 Great Time Management Worksheets

Now that you know the benefit of excellent time management and tips on how to achieve it, here are the 10 best time management templates. Feel free to create your own if none of these are perfect for you.

1. Weekly Time Management Template

2. Weekly Time Management Template

See this article for time blocking tips

3. Daily Task List

4. Daily Time Log

5. 90-Day Calendar

6. Chores Template

7. Daily Time Tracking Template

8. Class Schedule Template

9. Rolling Action Item List

10. Prioritized Task List

Excel has more built-in templates for time management worksheets than you could ever use. The worksheets we linked to above may be either printed out or replicated using your favorite software. A good template will help you visualize the priorities of the tasks you need to accomplish and give you a great idea of when things need to be completed. Try to get a high-level view of how all your tasks work together.

Conclusion

Time management worksheets are crucial for reducing stress in your life and improving productivity. Time management skills will cause your peers to look up to you and trust you as reliable. You will be happier and have more time to do what is important to you. Taking care of your priorities quickly and delegating unimportant tasks positions you to take opportunities you would have missed if you had been crunching to meet a deadline.

Use a template to create the best worksheet for your needs, be it studying, working on a group project or completing chores around the house. Outline what needs to get done for the day and use a large worksheet with many days to see a high-level picture of where you are and what you need to accomplish.