In this new article you’ll learn what are some good time management skills.
You know the feeling. The day ends, you’re tired, and you can’t name the one thing you finished.
That’s rarely a willpower problem. Most of us work inside a stream of pings, meetings and half-started tasks, and nobody ever taught us how to steer through it. The good news is that time management is a learnable set of skills, and the research on whether it works is fairly reassuring. A 2021 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE by Brad Aeon, Aïda Faber and Alexandra Panaccio pulled together 158 studies and found that time management was moderately linked to job performance, academic achievement and wellbeing. The surprise was where the biggest payoff landed: life satisfaction, more than performance reviews. In other words, managing your time well tends to make you feel better about your days, not only more productive in them. (Those links are correlations, so treat them as encouraging rather than as proof that any one trick will change your life.)
Below you’ll find 15 skills, each with the reason it works and one small thing to do about it. If you’ve been trying to get more organized at work, think of this as the layer underneath: the habits that make any system stick.
1. Run a one-week time audit
Before you fix your schedule, look at it honestly. Your memory of how you spend a Tuesday is a flattering summary. A written log is not.
The case for writing it down is strong. Benjamin Harkin, Thomas Webb and colleagues reviewed 138 randomized studies with 19,951 participants for Psychological Bulletin in 2016. Prompting people to monitor their progress made them more likely to reach their goals, and the effect was larger when the information was physically recorded or shared with someone else. The study is a decade old, but it remains the largest synthesis on the question, and it’s the reason a time log beats a vague sense of where the hours went.
Picture this: you’re sure email takes “maybe an hour a day.” By Wednesday your log shows two and a half, mostly in four-minute bursts. That number is useful. A feeling isn’t.
Start small: for five workdays, jot down what you’re doing every 30 minutes. Don’t judge it yet. Just collect.
2. Guard your peak hours
Most people have stretches of the day when their thinking is sharpest. The trouble is that everyone else wants those same hours.
Microsoft’s June 2025 Work Trend Index special report, “Breaking down the infinite workday,” analysed anonymized Microsoft 365 activity data and found that half of all meetings fall between 9 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m. Those are the windows many people describe as their most productive. Message traffic peaks around 11 a.m. too, when 54% of users are active. So the hours best suited for hard thinking are the ones most likely to be chopped up by calls and chat.
You can’t always control your calendar. You can usually defend one block. Pick your best 90 minutes, mark it as busy, and treat it like a meeting with someone important (because it is). If you’ve ever slipped into a proper flow state, you’ll know it rarely happens in a 20-minute gap between calls.
Your move: book two 90-minute focus blocks for next week, in your sharpest hours, before anyone else claims them.
3. Turn vague goals into if-then plans
“I’ll work on the report this week” is a wish. “If it’s Tuesday at 9, then I open the report draft before email” is a plan.
Psychologists call the second version an implementation intention, and it’s one of the better-tested tools in behavioural science. Paschal Sheeran, Olivia Listrom and Peter Gollwitzer published a meta-analysis of 642 tests of if-then planning in the European Review of Social Psychology (online 2024, in print January 2025). Forming these plans helped people across thinking, feeling and behaviour outcomes, with effect sizes ranging from small to moderate-large (d between .27 and .66). Effects were bigger when the plan used a genuine if-then format, when people actually cared about the goal, and when they rehearsed the plan.
That last detail matters. A plan you say once and forget is weak. A plan you’ve repeated to yourself a few times is the one that fires when the moment comes. It’s also a quiet way of learning to keep the promises you make to yourself.
Here’s a simple way in: write three if-then sentences for this week’s most important task, each tied to a specific time or trigger, and read them aloud once tomorrow morning.
4. Pad your estimates, and plan backward
You will underestimate how long things take. Almost everyone does, and knowing that doesn’t seem to cure it.
The mechanism is worth understanding. When you estimate a task, you mentally walk through the steps of doing it well. That imagined version is tidy. It skips the interruptions, the colleague who needs “two minutes,” the other deadline that lands mid-week. So the actual working time might be estimated about right, while the finish date drifts, because the finish date depends on everything around the task. Jessica Wiese, Roger Buehler and Dale Griffin made exactly this distinction in a 2016 paper in Judgment and Decision Making. Across four experiments, people who planned backward, starting from the deadline and working in reverse, predicted later and more realistic completion dates. In the study that tracked real projects, participants generally finished later than they’d predicted, but that optimism gap disappeared in the backward-planning group.
The cause-and-effect chain here is well supported for prediction. Whether backward planning makes you finish sooner is less clear; in that study it changed the forecasts more than the behaviour. Still, honest forecasts mean fewer late nights. And if delays tend to snowball into avoidance for you, the tactics in this guide to procrastination and laziness pair well with better planning.
Next time, do this: start your plan at the due date and list each step in reverse. Then add a buffer for the stuff that isn’t the task.
5. Batch your messages instead of grazing on them
Email and chat feel like small things. Added up, they’re the weather system your whole day happens inside.
The numbers from Microsoft’s June 2025 report are blunt. The average worker in its data received 117 emails and 153 Teams messages per weekday. Among the 20% of users who receive the most pings, an interruption from a meeting, email or chat arrived roughly every two minutes during core hours, about 275 times across a full day. Those heavy-user figures don’t describe everyone, and Microsoft sells the tools in question, but the direction is hard to argue with: if you answer every ping as it lands, you never get a long run at anything.
Batching means checking messages at set times rather than continuously. Two to four check-ins a day covers most roles. Turn off banner notifications between them, and tell your team when they can expect a reply so nobody thinks you’ve vanished. If the problem spills into your evenings, the steps for breaking a doomscrolling habit work just as well on an inbox you keep refreshing. Choose your check-in times today, write them on a sticky note, and silence everything in between.
6. Do one thing at a time
Multitasking feels efficient. It mostly isn’t.
Gloria Mark, professor emerita of informatics at UC Irvine, has spent about two decades measuring how long people stay on a single screen. In a 2024 interview with the University of California newsroom, she explained that early in her research people averaged about 150 seconds on one screen before switching. By the 2016 to 2020 studies, that had dropped to 47 seconds. She also noted that getting back on track after an interruption can take close to half an hour. Her work is observational, so it shows how attention behaves rather than proving a single cause, but it explains why a “quick check” costs so much more than it seems.
Say you’re halfway through a budget spreadsheet and you flick to chat to answer one question. Ten minutes later you’re reading a thread about the office party, and the spreadsheet feels unfamiliar when you come back. That’s the cost Mark describes, in miniature. Switching has a re-entry fee. If your brain already feels frazzled by noise and tabs, it’s worth learning how to stop overstimulation before it builds.
A quick experiment: for your next focused task, close every tab and app you don’t need, put your phone in another room, and see how long you last before the urge to switch kicks in.
7. Cut the meetings that don’t earn their slot
Meetings are where calendars go to die. Some are essential. Plenty are habit.
Shopify became the famous example. In January 2023 the company wiped recurring meetings with more than two people from employees’ calendars and discouraged meetings on Wednesdays. A month in, chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian told NPR the company had deleted 322,000 hours of meetings in a firm of about 10,000 remote employees, which he likened to adding 150 people. By July 2023, Fortune reported that average meeting time per worker had fallen 14% over the first five months of the year compared with the same period a year earlier. These are the company’s own figures, not an independent study, and meeting researcher Steven Rogelberg told NPR he wasn’t a fan of such a blunt purge. Good meetings still matter.
So don’t read it as a licence to delete everything. Read it as proof that recurring meetings rarely get questioned, and plenty survive on inertia alone. Microsoft’s June 2025 data adds another wrinkle: 57% of meetings in its telemetry were ad hoc calls with no calendar invite, which means a lot of the disruption never even shows up on a schedule.
Test it this week: go through your recurring meetings and, for each one, ask whether you’d accept the invite if it arrived fresh today. Decline, shorten or switch the ones that fail to a written update.
8. Take real breaks, on purpose
Breaks can look like lost time. The research says they’re closer to maintenance.
Patricia Albulescu and colleagues at the West University of Timișoara published a meta-analysis of micro-breaks (pauses of 10 minutes or less) in PLOS ONE in August 2022. Across 22 studies, short breaks had small but reliable effects on boosting energy and reducing fatigue. The effect on overall performance wasn’t statistically significant, although longer breaks were linked to bigger performance gains, which suggests that draining work needs more than a quick pause. A newer scoping review by Eren Ogut in BMC Medical Education (2025) gathered 32 studies on the Pomodoro method, with 5,270 participants in total. In the three randomized trials it found, structured work-and-break intervals produced roughly 20% lower fatigue than self-paced breaks. Ogut rated the overall certainty of that evidence as moderate to low, since most studies were observational and student-based.
So breaks reliably help you feel less drained, and they may help you work better on demanding tasks if they’re long enough. Step away from the screen, move, look out of a window. If stress has your body wound tight, a few of these quick resets for your nervous system fit neatly into a five-minute pause.
Give it a go: set a timer for 25 or 50 minutes of focused work, then take a real 5 to 10 minute break away from screens, and repeat it three times tomorrow.
9. Say no more often, and say it kindly
Every yes is a withdrawal from a finite account. Most of us overdraw it.
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, a survey of 31,000 workers across 31 countries carried out between February and March 2025, captured the squeeze neatly: 53% of leaders said productivity had to increase, while 80% of the workforce said they lacked the time or energy to do their work. When demand rises and capacity doesn’t, something has to give, and it’s usually your evenings or your best work.
Saying no doesn’t have to sound like a door slamming. Imagine a colleague asks you to join a new working group. You might reply: “I’d like to help, but I’m committed to the launch until the 15th. Could I review the plan once it’s drafted instead?” You’ve protected your time and still offered something real. Repeated overcommitment is one of the slow routes to quiet cracking, the low-grade burnout that hides behind a person who still answers every email.
Prepare one polite “not right now” sentence in advance, so it’s ready the next time a request lands on a full week.
10. Limit how many projects you juggle at once
Doing fewer things sounds like a recipe for getting less done. Cal Newport argues it’s the opposite.
Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, makes the case in his 2024 book Slow Productivity. His first principle, as he put it in a February 2024 interview on Adam Grant’s ReThinking podcast, is to “do fewer things at the same time.” In a March 2024 summary of the book he stressed that working on fewer things at once doesn’t mean finishing fewer things. Each active project carries overhead: emails, check-ins, the mental tax of keeping it in your head. Cut the number of open loops and that overhead shrinks, so the remaining work moves faster.
Think of it like traffic on a motorway. Add cars past a certain point and everyone slows down, until nothing moves at all. The comparison holds for the way overhead piles up as you add projects. It breaks down because your projects aren’t identical cars, and some genuinely need to run in parallel. Newport’s argument is expert opinion built on his own experience and reading, not a controlled trial, so take it as a strong rule of thumb.
Start small: list every project you’re actively working on, pick the two or three that matter most this month, and park the rest on a clearly labelled “later” list.
11. End the day by writing tomorrow’s list
The last ten minutes of your workday can buy you a calmer evening and a faster start tomorrow.
Michael Scullin and his team at Baylor University’s Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory tested this in a 2018 study. They brought 57 young adults into a sleep lab, had them spend five minutes before bed writing either a to-do list for the coming days or a list of tasks they’d already done, and measured their sleep with polysomnography. The to-do list group fell asleep faster, and the more specific their lists, the quicker they dropped off. Scullin suggested that writing tasks down offloads them, so they stop circling in your head. It was a single, small lab study with students, so the result needs more replication, but it fits with everyday experience of lying awake rehearsing tomorrow.
The work version is a shutdown ritual: review what’s done, write down what’s next, close the laptop. If falling asleep is a nightly battle, there are more ideas in this guide on how to get to sleep faster.
Tonight’s version: spend five minutes writing tomorrow’s three most important tasks, each with a concrete first step, then shut everything down.
12. Keep one trusted place for your information
Lost files and buried messages are a sneaky time thief. You don’t notice them because each search only takes a minute or two.
Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 report, published in April 2025 and based on a survey of 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 Fortune 1000 executives, found that teams and leaders spend about 25% of their time searching for answers. That’s a self-reported figure from a company that sells collaboration software, so it may run high. Even half of that would be a lot.
The cost is bigger than it looks. Every search starts with a switch away from the task you were doing, then a hunt through email, chat and folders, then a climb back into the original work. That’s the same re-entry fee from skill 6, paid over and over. When notes, files and decisions live in one place you trust, the hunt shrinks and so does the switching.
Your move: pick a single home for project notes and decisions, whether that’s one notebook, one shared document or one app, and spend 20 minutes this week moving the stray bits into it.
13. Pair dull tasks with something you enjoy
Some tasks will never be fun. You can still make them easier to start.
Behavioural scientists call this temptation bundling: you allow yourself a treat only while doing the thing you’ve been avoiding. Erika Kirgios, Katherine Milkman, Angela Duckworth and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania tested it with 6,792 members of the 24 Hour Fitness gym chain in a study published in 2020 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Giving people an audiobook and encouraging them to listen only while exercising raised their likelihood of a weekly workout by 10 to 14%, during the four-week programme and for up to 17 weeks afterwards. The study measured gym visits, not paperwork, so applying it to your expense reports is a reasonable extension rather than a tested result.
The principle travels well. A favourite playlist only for admin. A good coffee only while you clear your inbox. A podcast you love only while ironing. If you tend to stall on the first step of unpleasant work, these strategies to stop procrastinating work nicely alongside a bundle.
Here’s a simple way in: choose one task you dread and one small pleasure you’ll reserve exclusively for it, then use the pairing the next three times that task comes up.
14. Hand off what doesn’t need you
The reference point for “can I delegate this?” has shifted. It used to mean a colleague. Increasingly it also means software.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report, published in May 2026, surveyed 20,000 knowledge workers who use AI at work across 10 countries between February and April 2026. Two-thirds (66%) said AI had let them spend more time on high-value work. The most advanced group, which Microsoft calls Frontier Professionals, were more likely than others to deliberately pause before starting work to decide what should be done by AI and what by a human (53% vs 33%). The report also found that 86% treat AI output as a starting point rather than a final answer. All of this is self-reported, the sample only includes people already using AI, and Microsoft has an obvious commercial interest, so read it as a picture of current habits rather than proof of time saved.
The habit worth copying is the pause, not the tool. Before you start a task, ask: does this need my judgement, or just my hands? If it’s the second, it might belong to a colleague, a template, an automation or an AI assistant you then check carefully. Delegating well still means staying responsible for the result.
Test it this week: before each task on Monday, spend ten seconds deciding whether it needs you, and hand off or automate at least one that doesn’t.
15. Put a ceiling on your working hours
Most time management advice skips one skill entirely: deciding when to stop.
The most rigorous recent evidence comes from four-day week trials. Wen Fan and Juliet Schor of Boston College, with Orla Kelly and Guolin Gu, published their analysis in Nature Human Behaviour in July 2025. They followed 2,896 employees across 141 organizations in six countries through six-month four-day week trials, with no cut in pay, and compared them with 12 control companies. Burnout, job satisfaction, and mental and physical health all improved, a pattern the control companies didn’t show. Average working time fell by about five hours a week, and people whose hours dropped by eight or more saw the largest gains. Better self-rated work ability, fewer sleep problems and less fatigue explained much of the effect. Companies chose to take part, though, and most were small or mid-sized firms in English-speaking countries, so the authors themselves call for randomized trials.
You probably can’t redesign your company’s week. But the mechanism scales down. Fewer hours forced those firms to strip out low-value work, and the extra rest made the remaining hours better. A hard stop at the end of your day does a smaller version of the same thing, which is why it pairs so well with the shutdown list from skill 11. Pick a finish time for each workday next week, put it in your calendar, and treat it as a deadline for your work rather than a suggestion.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. A crisis week will flatten your focus blocks, or you’ll find yourself answering messages at 10 p.m. again. That’s normal, and how you respond matters more than the slip itself.
First, expect the learning curve to be longer than the internet promises. A systematic review led by Ben Singh at the University of South Australia, published in Healthcare in December 2024, looked at 20 studies with 2,601 participants. The few that measured how long habits take to form found medians of 59 to 66 days, averages of 106 to 154 days, and individual results ranging from 4 to 335 days. The studies covered health behaviours rather than work routines, but the message carries: three weeks of wobbling doesn’t mean the habit has failed. It means it’s still forming. If you want company on that road, these good habits to build into your life follow the same slow logic.
Second, go easy on yourself. Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett followed first-year students through two rounds of midterms in a 2010 study in Personality and Individual Differences. Among students who had procrastinated heavily before the first exam, those who forgave themselves procrastinated less before the second. It’s an older, correlational study of 119 students, so it doesn’t prove that self-forgiveness causes better behaviour. It does suggest that beating yourself up keeps you stuck in the guilt that made you avoid the work in the first place.
Then restart small. Don’t rebuild your whole system on Monday. Pick one skill from this list, the one that slipped most, and run it for a single day. If the whole day went sideways, these steps to turn a bad day around can help you salvage the evening before you try again tomorrow.
Conclusion
Squeezing more into each hour was never really the point. Protect the hours that matter, be choosy about what gets your attention, and stop at a sensible time. You don’t need all 15 skills at once (skill 10 would object). Pick two that address your biggest leak, practise them for a few weeks, and add another when they feel automatic.
For more practical ideas on focus, meetings and getting through the working week with your sanity intact, browse the rest of our work articles.
