hi I'm kchoi welcome back to my channel this little nugget here is cookie that
is my sister-in-law's family dog they are staying with us for a little bit so
yeah cookie is joining me today for this
video so I've been a full-time working adult for six years now - the year that
I was in grad school I guess but in those years I've had to learn how to
manage my time on a day to day basis to make sure I get all of my daily work
tasks done in this video I wanted to share three pretty simple tactics that I
use and that you can use to manage your time and take ownership of your time at
work I don't think anything I'm about to share is revolutionary by any means but
hopefully it can be a good reminder or if you're entering the workforce for the
first time maybe it can help you develop some good habits from the start now
these tactics are more specifically around daily time management but if you
want to see a video about overall kind of big-picture time management and
work-life balance then give this video a like to let me know and while you're
down there just you know click those other buttons as well I would really
appreciate it okay let's begin tactic number one is to keep your calendar
up-to-date and by that I mean making sure your calendar accurately reflects
what meetings and calls you're going to that day when you get a meeting invite
you can accept or decline and even reply that you'll be tentative in Gmail I
think it's a simple yes no or maybe so I'm really just talking about the simple
act of replying yes or accept if you're going to the meeting replying no or
declining if you're not and then using that maybe or tentative in two different
ways one is literally if you are just a maybe for that meeting and you just
can't confirm at the moment but the other way which I use more frequently is
to let the meeting organizer know that I can't attend but I want to mark the
meeting as tentative so that I just have visibility that that meeting or call is
happening this helps the person organizing the meeting know that they
wouldn't have to wait for you once the meeting begin and it helps you
personally keep track of what's going on in a project if that meeting has to do
with a specific project team that you're on so keeping that
calendar up-to-date and accurate helps you because it helps your co-workers and
colleagues know what you're doing that day and if they want to book meetings
they're not accidentally booking over something that's already happening or
that you're already attending so every night before the next day of work I look
at my up-to-date calendar and I'm just able to plan out my morning think about
what time I need to get into the office and all of that now for some of you you
might have a set time that you go into the office everyday for me it's a little
bit more flexible and if I have a pretty early phonecall let's say I have a call
that starts at 8:00 a.m. I might take that call from home and then go into the
office after that I might see that my whole day is filled with phone calls and
meetings and so I decide to work from home that day so I do that on a nightly
basis because I just don't have the capacity to remember you know what's
going on in my entire week so I just take it day by day
the second tactic which is related to your calendar but I still see it as a
separate thing is to block out working time on your calendar now I don't use
this tactic every single day but on days when I especially have a lot of work to
get done more I don't actually have that many calls and meetings I will block off
hours of time on my calendar and reserve that for specific working time that I
need that way if I know that I definitely need to sit down and work on
something for two hours I can reserve that time to do it and I am at less risk
of having that become filled up with any last-minute calls or meetings by my
colleagues of course you can't always protect that working time but it helps a
lot not only for your own personal time management of knowing what things you
need to get done but also allowing you to have as few interruptions as possible
I'll not only do this for working time but I'll do that for appointments as
well so let's say I have a doctor's appointment I'll be sure to block that
on my calendar as well as a buffer on each side so I'm not having a phone call
all the way up until my appointment begins I definitely think this tactic of
blocking off certain hours of time when you need to and owning your calendar in
that way is one of the most effective ways to manage your time wisely at work
and the third tactic is to write lists but right
prioritised lists now the way you write your own to-do list or task list every
day might look different it could be good old paper and pen it could be a
notes app on your phone I personally use the task or flag option or feature in
Microsoft Outlook but the technique can apply to whatever list format you want
what I personally do is in the flags or tasks feature and outlook I will just
write my to-do lists and my tasks either at the beginning of the day or
throughout the day and what I'll do is I'll categorize them by when they need
to be completed so the basic categories I use are today
tomorrow this week next week and that's just driven by the format of outlook and
the options they have there's also an option to put a specific date but I will
only use that sometimes I'll typically use those other four categories the
reason it's important to prioritize your task list is that you want to be able to
focus so if you just keep a running list and it keeps going on and on and on
you're not gonna know what to focus on and you'll tend to just do kind of the
quick wins or you might start to try to tackle something that's bigger than you
can take on at that moment so whatever list format you use whether it's
handwriting it or using an app or anything else you also want to have a
system for prioritizing them again I organized my list with the categories
today tomorrow this week next week and I'm sure there are many other systems
out there but the goal is to create your to-do list or your task list and then
prioritize it so that's it for this video I hope it was helpful I hope it
maybe gave you a couple of new ideas of things you can do to manage your time
better if you have some more tactics that you use please leave them in the
comments below because I would love to learn about them and I'm sure other
people in the comments would love to see as well also let me know what other
topics related to career education travel or anything else you'd like to
see as always thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next
one bye say bye cookie say bye