14 Jun How to Boost Your Productivity by Using a Task Tracker
Are you often left wondering where your time has gone? In a typical workday, how much of that time do you think is actually spent working? 30 minutes? An hour? Maybe even two or three hours? Unless you’re one of the rare outliers out there, the answer to that question is probably not as much as you think. The truth is most people spend more time checking email, reading and responding to social media notifications, and other activities with little to no productivity return on investment.
Task management apps have been around for a while now. They exist to make it easier for us to manage our tasks and help us get things done more efficiently. Do you use a task management app or another system for keeping track of your tasks? If not, are you interested in learning more about them and how they can improve your workflow? Keep reading for some great tips on how using a task management app can boost your productivity and help you stay organized!
Make your to-do list work for you
While a to-do list might seem like a fairly basic tool, not many people take the time to actually use it effectively. Did you know that you could get an extra hour in your day by making small adjustments to your daily routine? We’ve all heard that a million times, but how many people actually put in the effort to change their routine? One of the most important things you can do, when creating a to-do list, is to make sure that you are only including items on there that are actually doable. If you have tasks on your list that are too big and that you have no idea how to break down, you’re going to end up putting them off until the last minute and then feeling overwhelmed. One solution to this problem is to assign a time frame to each item on your list. Not only will this help you prioritize your tasks, it will also allow you to better estimate how long tasks will take you and give you a better idea of how much time you can spend on each item.
Know what’s important
Another important thing to keep in mind when creating a to-do list is that different tasks are important in different ways. You might, for example, have a task that you need to get done for work, a task that needs to be done for a charity fundraiser, and a task that you have to do for your family. On your to-do list, you may experience a bit of a conundrum. Which tasks are more important? Which ones should be at the top of your list? What about the tasks that don’t have an obvious deadline? When you’re trying to decide what to put on your to-do list, it’s helpful to take into account not only what you need to get done, but why it needs to be done. It’s not enough to know that you need to contact the accountant about your taxes; you also need to know why they need to be done now. In other words, you need to know what the purpose behind each task is. This will help you to better prioritize your tasks and keep you focused on what’s really important. It will also help to ease any guilt that you might feel when you can’t get everything done.
Estimate how long tasks will take
Another thing that you need to consider when making a to-do list is how long each task will take. You might, for example, have a task that needs to be completed by the end of the week. What about another task that needs to be done by the end of the day? Which task do you work on first? There are two ways to go about estimating the time it will take you to complete a task. The first is to use past data to predict future results. If you’ve been working on certain tasks for a while and you know how long they generally take, you can put them on your to-do list with their associated times. The second way to estimate how long tasks will take is to use a standard. If you know that it normally takes an accountant three hours to complete an audit, you can add that to your to-do list and know that it will be done by a certain time.
Track everything you do
One of the best ways to boost your productivity is to keep track of everything you do. For example, if you know that you spent an hour on social media, you can subtract that time from your workday. This is especially helpful if you typically have a hard time knowing when to take breaks from work. When tracking your time, you should be sure to record each and every activity that you do during the day. Some task management apps enable you to track your time and use that information to estimate how much time you spend on different activities throughout the day. Others will allow you to manually add in the amount of time you spend on each activity.
Don’t rely on memory
Speaking of manually recording the amount of time you spend on certain tasks, you should also be sure to keep track of the amount of time you spend on each task. You might think that you only spend a couple of hours on a task, but when you go to enter that data into your task management app, you realize that you spent five hours on it. What happened? When you track the amount of time you spend on each task, you can better estimate the amount of time it will take you to complete the task and better manage your time. This is particularly beneficial if you have a hard time estimating how long it takes you to finish tasks. If you find that you have a hard time remembering how long it takes you to complete different tasks, consider keeping a time log for a few days. This will help you to get a better idea of how long different tasks take you and will allow you to plan your time.
Conclusion
When you use a task manager, it is like having a virtual assistant tracking all the tasks you do. You will know what you have done, and you will know what you need to do next. With that in mind, you can use a task manager to keep track of everything you do. Even though many people are looking for ways to boost their productivity, not many of them know how to go about doing it. That’s because they don’t know how to use a task manager to their advantage. When you use a great task manager, you will be able to track your time, know what’s important, estimate how long tasks will take, track everything you do, and not rely on memory.