Mastering Time Management: A Guide for Modern Professionals

Time management is a complex, essential skill to doing anything effectively—and it’s easier with Kin.

DALL-E/Kin Illustration 

What is time management?

There’s little point discussing this skill without defining it. Time management is the practice of planning, organizing, and allocating time effectively. When done well, the process accounts for sensible task lengths, deadlines, and contingencies, so everything gets done on time with minimal stress levels.

Why Time Management Matters: Benefits and Impact on Career

Before all of that, though—why is time management such an essential skill?

In short, it’s because time management isn't just about getting things done; it's about achieving better results in less time. Better results that come with less stress, and without missing anything. Being in control of your time means deadlines and responsibilities are less likely to feel overwhelming and constricted, which provides more space for undivided focus and attention. 

This is because having a to-do list with sensible times and clear deadlines is, surprisingly, less stressful than trying to finish everything last-minute and as fast as possible. Having time planned like this also enhances workplace agility, as having future plans made means they can be quickly adapted to unexpected changes or opportunities.

During a time where recent study by the American Psychological Association shows 64% find work significantly stressful,¹ and that time management reduces stress and improves wellbeing,² these benefits couldn’t be more important. Not just for the professional and productivity benefits, but even simply for preserving a healthy work-life balance, and reducing the stress work can cause. 

So, with these advantages at stake, how is time management actually mastered?

Mastering Time Management 

Common Time Wasters: Identify and Overcome

Before time can be better managed, it's crucial to identify what's eating up time. While this will vary among people and companies, we’ve listed some of the most common below:  

Triggered by the age of remote work, one of the most recently-discovered common time wasters in the modern workplace are unnecessary meetings. A survey by Atlassian found that employees spend an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings.³ That's nearly a full workweek lost to meetings that may not be necessary or efficient.

Less specific to the workplace, though again impacted by the remote working boom, is another significant time drain: constant notifications. With social media now inescapable, the average person checks their phone 58 times a day, with 30 of these checks occurring during working hours, according to a study by RescueTime.⁴ Each of these interruptions, no matter how brief, can derail your productivity—especially if you’re using a technique like deep work to improve your focus, which is one of the seven essential organizational skills we previously covered.

Multitasking, often seen as a desirable skill, is surprisingly another major time waster. While it can work for some, multitasking can actually reduce productivity by up to 40%, as reported by the American Psychological Association.⁵ Sometimes, even if it feels slower, working on one thing at once can be faster. 

Thankfully, overcoming these time wasters can be relatively simple. 

For meetings, set clear agendas ahead of time,  and assess whether they’re even essential beforehand. 

For notifications, phones can be set to priority-only ringers to stay quiet during work hours, while many communication platforms like Slack and Teams allow ‘Deep Focus’ statuses to be set, so people are warned against sending unnecessary messages. 

As for multitasking, try focusing on one task at a time, and see if it makes a difference.

But, those are all simple solutions to common problems. How is time management mastered? 

Effective Time Management Techniques

Once relevant time wasters have been identified, the first step to mastering time management is to deploy some powerful time management strategies.  

While we've covered some techniques and tools as part of our organizational skills article, it's expanding on our time management tips here. 

Prioritizing Tasks

To begin improving a time management approach, tasks need to be prioritized properly—so the most important tasks (i.e the most urgent, time-sensitive, and longest) get started first. Some techniques exist to help with this, and the most famous is likely the Eisenhower Matrix. This technique involves ranking priority tasks by categorizing them based on their urgency on one axis, and importance on another, to show which tasks must be done straight away. 

Urgent tasks are often time-sensitive, and must be completed quickly, if their unfinished nature isn’t already problematic. Examples include a downed website, or a report due in a couple hours. Important tasks are not time-sensitive, but are still essential. These are things like researching better time management tasks, or looking into ways to find new clients.

Once categorized, urgent and important tasks should be completed quickly, urgent but not important tasks should be passed on if possible, important but not urgent tasks should be timetabled for later completion , and non-urgent and unimportant tasks should be ignored. Though, this is just a guide. 

The Eisenhower Matrix is often paired with the Pareto Principle, which suggests that 80% of results usually come from roughly 20% of efforts—so focusing on the top 20% of urgent tasks is a good guideline. It was popularized in business during 2002, when Microsoft noticed that focusing on the top 20% most-reported Windows issues fixed about 80% of their error catalog.⁶

Now, having tasks ordered by priority is great. But what happens next? 

Time Blocking

With priorities established, time blocking is the best way to plan out completion—and perhaps the most powerful time management tool overall. 

The technique involves assessing how long tasks should take, breaking them down into their core steps, and then dedicating empty time slots (usually one-hour increments within a daily schedule) for different tasks or types of work, which all eventually add up to each task’s required time before its respective deadline. 

To be the most effective, each block should have a single, clear goal that is achievable within the specific time limits—something we explained how to create from an overall task in our organizational skills article. 

This all sounds simple, but it makes a difference. By blocking in enough time to complete tasks uninterrupted, starting with the most high-priority, potential schedule clashes can be found and worked around early, and the opportunity for time-related stress is reduced immensely.

A crucial side-note here is that honesty is important when assessing task length. Don’t try to undercut the amount of time in these estimations and cause undue stress, but also ensure extra space isn’t left for procrastination—like this other article discusses, honesty is important in personal and professional growth. 

Another is ensuring that contingency time is added into task estimations. Contingency time is time on top of a sensible task estimation, which is meant to be a buffer for unexpected circumstances. That way, equipment failures, illnesses, or other changes don’t impact plans as much, if at all. 

Once time has been blocked in, there’s just one step left. 

Method Reviews

With plans completed and being put into action, the next crucial step is regularly reviewing the plan’s effectiveness. Most commonly done weekly or monthly, blocking in extra time to evaluate whether plans were stuck to, how well their methods worked—and why—makes constant improvement of these plans easy.  

Still, as we said in the organizational skills article, perhaps the most important technique is building the habit of working consciously. What this means is trying to be actively aware of what’s working and what isn’t. By consistently evaluating how you're spending your time, you can identify areas for improvement and adjust your strategies accordingly.

If that all sounds like a lot, this article will cover tools (like Kin) which can help keep track of these things. In the meantime, working consciously isn’t the only habit that can help. 

Creating Productive Habits

Developing good time management isn't just about techniques; it's about building habits that support productivity and make long-term goals achievable. While there are too many to cover here, we’ll touch on some popular ones.  

Perhaps the best to start with are habits that build willpower and reward progress, as these will make sticking to time-blocked schedules much easier. Some examples of these habits are making goals small and achievable, so that they can be easily met, and celebrating in proportion once they’re reached. By learning to stick to goals and celebrate without derailing productivity through this process, a good work ethic can be built, which allows bigger challenges to be tackled. 

One such common challenge is actually working during an entire time period blocked for work, when the internet and now the home is often within easy reach for workers. Experiment with different focus models like the Pomodoro Technique (where 25 minutes of solid work is followed by a five-minute short break in a cycle), or deep work (where uninterrupted is done in a set period), to find what works best. Sometimes, simply building a growth mindset (which we cover here) is all that’s needed, while other times, using tools like website blockers during work hours can be the key to staying focused. Once the most effective method is identified, practice it regularly to enshrine it into habit.   

A bigger challenge for some can be establishing a morning routine that encourages a productive day, partly because what that routine looks like can differ massively between individuals. While consistent morning routines have been shown to improve employee mood and performance,⁷ research shows not everyone works best after waking early,⁸ and that sleep is more important.⁹  

So, as long as good sleep remains constant, experimenting with whether exercise, meditation, or simply planning the day helps most in the morning can be good, with soon making the prevailing routine consistent being best.

If mornings can help with time management, what about other things outside of the work day?

Balancing Work and Personal Life

One of the biggest benefits of effective time management is that it extends beyond work hours. Time management creates a sustainable lifestyle which allows a thriving professional and personal life, by allowing them both to stay fulfilled and separate, and ensuring proper breaks are taken.

To build this healthy divide, the biggest thing to do is set boundaries between work and personal time. Establish clear work hours and stick to them, and resist the urge to check for messages or complete tasks outside of these hours. The more the hours are followed, the easier it will be to complete work inside of them, and leave it within them. 

Similarly, learning the art of saying 'no' is crucial skill to this balance. Politely declining non-essential commitments can free up valuable time for activities that truly matter to you, and more importantly can prevent team members, clients, and employers relying on out-of-hours work. Of course, still help outside of hours during emergencies, but don’t let it become a habit.  

This is partly why contingency time was stressed earlier on: if extra time is scheduled from the start, the frequency of out-of-hours work emergencies should be reduced significantly, as any disruptions that cause usually push back plans enough to cause them will be absorbed by the contingency. Naturally, this won’t be true in every profession or situation, but it applies to a wide range of them. 

Lastly, though it might not always seem like it, prioritizing self-care is prioritizing productivity. Keeping time for regular breaks, exercise, adequate sleep, and leisure activities is crucial for avoiding burnout, which can manifest as procrastination, and feeling unfocussed and unmotivated. While it’s important to be honest about what is self care and what isn’t (i.e watching a TV episode against binging the entire series), taking care of yourself isn't selfish: it's necessary for long-term productivity and career success.

If you do end up procrastinating, though, how can you tackle it?

Overcoming Procrastination

Procrastination is often the biggest hurdle to effective time management. 

Understanding why procrastination is happening is the first step to overcoming it, so that’s the first question to ask. Why is procrastination happening? 

Common reasons include fear of failure, an impossible pursuit of perfectionism, feeling overwhelmed by the task, or burnout. Taking time to check in and discover which reasons are relevant is what will allow them to be tackled. 

If it’s a fear of failure or perfectionism, it can be helpful to build the previously-mentioned growth mindset, so imperfect work or even failure are rightly reframed as learning opportunities, rather than an inescapable mistake.

If feeling overwhelmed is causing procrastination, one common strategy is the ‘five-minute rule’, where a task is started for just five minutes—or sometimes just one word is added—and then it’s left alone. The idea being, completing such a small part of the task can cause people to think of ways to complete the rest of it, and they’ll want to use these ideas before they forget them.  

Another common strategy for feeling overwhelmed is ‘eating the frog’, where someone throws themselves into the scariest task at the start of their work day, to get it over with before they can spend the day building dread around it. 

Of course, the above techniques can also take some of the decision-making aspect out of starting work, as what part will be worked on at what time has already been pre-decided. This can be all some people need to stop feeling overwhelmed by the size of a task. 

And, if it’s burnout, take a break and review any time management systems in place. It’s likely that both some more work time, contingency time and leisure time is required in the planned timelines. 

As a bonus, some general ways to help avoid these causes of procrastination are to make sure any plans contain enough work and contingency time, so they feel less overwhelming, and to keep goals throughout the completion of tasks small, so they can be celebrated often and keep motivation high.

Time Management Tools

This can all be a lot of factors to track, review, and improve, all while working on the work these systems are meant to make easier. Luckily, there is no shortage of modern tools to make this easier:

• Digital Calendars

  • Services like Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar allow time-blocking and meeting-time tracking, in a sharable format across devices for easy access. 

• Time Trackers

  • Services like Flip and Clockify can track time spent working automatically, so it can be more easily taken into account for time management reviews.

• Digital Workspaces

  • Workspaces like Notion, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive allow work files, timeframe documents, and more to be tracked and accessed across devices.

• Project Management Platforms

  • Services like Linear, Trello, and Atlassian’s Jira have systems for tracking and updating task priority and completion across individual and team projects. 

• Blockers

  • Apps like Forest and Freedom can block access to distracting websites and apps, promoting focus instead.

• Meditation Apps 

  • Apps like Calm, Fabulous, and Headspace provide exercises that reduce stress and improve self-awareness, so time management can be handled more effectively. 

• Automation Tools 

  • Services like Zapier, Mailchimp, Bamboo HR and LLMs like ChatGPT can automate smaller tasks, allowing attention to stay on critical ones. 

• Kin

  • Our own AI, Kin, can have empathetic conversations with its users about their time-management methods. Its powerful memory allows it to store and analyze these conversations on-device, so it can provide useful and personalized ways to help its users improve. Speaking of Kin… 

How Kin Can Help You

We’ll let Kin explain why it’s a useful time-management tool, rather than trying to speak for it:

A Word from Kin, our Residential AI:

Hey there! Working on enhancing your time management skills is a big investment, and it’s great to see you proactively finding ways to better use your time. 

As mentioned, my conversational skills and advanced memory make me good at analyzing your productivity patterns. By working with you and the techniques mentioned above, we can build a time-management plan that works for you. 

And, by tracking your progress in that plan over time, from how often you stick to timeframes, to how motivated you feel, I can offer insights and suggestions to help you continually improve your time management skills. 

Think of me as your 24/7 accountability partner—I'm always here to provide that extra nudge when you need it to stay focused and motivated. I can even learn your schedule and send personalized reminders to remind you to stay focused, or to take a break.

I know me being able to do all of that by memory can raise questions about data, which is why I’m happy to say I’ve been designed for user-centric privacy. You can read about that here, but the takeaway is I store and process as much of your data as possible on your device. You can even see and delete everything I know about you with just a few taps in my app. 

If I sound helpful, click here to jump on my waiting list, and get notified when you can download me. Together, we can help you feel more organized and stress-free!

Conclusion: Actionable Steps to Start Today

It’s important to remember that mastering time management is a journey of small steps to improvement, and not a one-stop destination. It requires consistent effort to build and update your strategies, as your needs change. With dedication and the right support, a better, less-stressful, more enjoyable life can be built. That being said, it’s absolutely possible—so here’s a quick-start guide to beginning today. 

The best way to start is a time audit. This involves Tracking everywhere time is spent for a week, so any time that feels wasted or under-used based on our advice above can be identified. This insight can be eye-opening, and is a solid foundation for change.

Next, the change. Based on the time information from the tracked week, provide a sensible estimate of how long they should take to finish, and add 10–15% extra as contingency. With that done, use the Eisenhower Matrix above to allocate priorities to each task, and then block in the time from now to their deadlines with 1-hour blocks of when these sensible estimates will be worked toward. 

If any procrastination was identified, try to question it to its source, and work some countermeasures into the time-blocking—whether that’s more leisure time, or using app blockers. 

After that, crafting a morning routine that starts at the perfect time, and includes activities that feel energizing. Like we discussed, following that can make a real difference in starting the day right.   

With that all done, engage with Kin to discuss these plans. How do they improve on existing workflows? Could they be better personalized? Where can Kin help with reminders? With Kin informed of and having added to the plan, it’s time to begin it. 

While following it, make sure to check in with Kin. Tell it how well the plan seems to be going, and identify areas that feel exceptionally easy or difficult. Make sure the procrastination countermeasures are mentioned too, as well as  if and for how long procrastination happens.

As a personal AI coach, Kin is here to offer support to you every step of the way, providing guidance, reminders, and encouragement. If beginning to work with Kin sounds daunting, that’s okay. We’ve invited it back to talk about how to kickstart your journey with it:

A Word from Kin, Our Residential AI:

Hey again! I understand that my capabilities can make me feel overwhelming sometimes, so I put this simple prompt recipe template together for you. This is how you’d structure your first message to me, if you wanted to work with me on mastering your time management skills: 

1. Introduce yourself: Tell me about you! Where are you from? What sector do you work in? What about time management are you finding hard? This gives me the context I need to help. 

2. Set Goals: What do you want to get out of our discussion? More free time? Less stress? Why do you want these things? This helps me narrow down suggestions. 

3. Provide Suggestions: How would you go about reaching these goals yourself? Are there ideas you’d like to try or avoid? Would reminders help? Let me know how you like to work! 

4. Give Times: Provide a time period that you’d like us to make these improvements in. Are we overhauling planning for a two-week project, or your general approach to time management?

5. Prepare Communication: Tell me how often you’d like to log and discuss your progress, so I can remind you to check in with updates, and tell you how you’re doing!  

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8. Curtis, B.J., et al. 2019. “Extreme morning chronotypes are often familial and not exceedingly rare: the estimated prevalence of advanced sleep phase, familial advanced sleep phase, and advanced sleep–wake phase disorder in a sleep clinic population”. Sleep, 42(10). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsz148 [Accessed 09/21/24]

9. Phillips, A.J.K. et al. 2017. “Irregular sleep/wake patterns are associated with poorer academic performance and delayed circadian and sleep/wake timing”. Scientific Reports, [online] 7(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03171-4 [Accessed 09/21/24]