What Is Time Management?

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You can become more focused by protecting your time better.

Assigning similar tasks to pre-scheduled time windows helps prevent distractions.

Separating task types makes you more effective in your professional life.

It also helps you shield your personal goals from work demands.

We all have the same amount of time: 24 hours per day. Yet, some people seem to make the most of it consistently, while others endlessly complain about how interruptions, distractions, and social media waste their time and keep talking about all the personal goals they will chase “someday.”

Here is the good news: You can become more focused by protecting your time better.

Many highly productive people, including famous authors and highly paid executives, have developed routines that sharply separate activities in different time windows. For example, some prolific novelists report devoting a set number of hours each morning to writing new material and undertaking revisions and editing only in the afternoon.

This is the essence of “time-boxing” and “task-batching.” Those are productivity and time-management techniques that divide your time into well-defined “boxes,” each devoted to only one task, or a type of similar tasks (for example, writing new material in the morning and revising in the afternoon). As we explained in this post, these methods help because they prevent multitasking, which research in cognitive psychology has shown to be a productivity killer. Many modern best-selling books on productivity and time management advocate some variant........

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