Are you punctual or late? Do you finish things within your stipulated time? Are you able to accomplish what you want to do before deadlines? How well do you manage your time? If your answer is not completely positive! Perhaps you feel overloaded, and you often have to work late to hit your deadlines. Or maybe your days seem to go from one crisis to another, and this is stressful and demoralizing.

The simple, unpleasant truth is that we are probably busier than we ever have been. Good time management is essential for coping with the pressures of modern life without experiencing too much stress. Time management is the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities.

It’s important that you develop effective strategies for managing your time in your daily life to balance the conflicting demands of time for study, leisure, earning money, job hunting, and work. Here I am going to tell you some great ways to manage your time the best.

1. Create A Daily Plan. Before you can manage your time, you need to know what it is you must manage. Write down every single task, both mundane and critical, that you need to accomplish. Be sure to include routine duties. Plan your day before it unfolds. Better you make the list, the night before you sleep. The plan gives you a good overview. The plan gives you a good overview of how the next day will pan out. That way, you don’t get caught off guard. Your job for the day is to stick to the plan as best as possible.

2. Setting Priorities And Goals. One of the most important time management strategies is often associated with setting personal goals. Set yourself specific and clearly defined goals. You should keep your goals recorded and may be broken down into a project, an action plan, or a simple task list. For individual tasks or for goals, you can assign an importance rating. Then you set deadlines for the tasks and assign priorities.   
3. First things first. This is the golden rule of time management. Find out – What is the single most important (not urgent) thing you could possibly be doing? Each day, identify the two or three tasks that are the most crucial to complete and do those first. Do some of that today. Then you can move on to other things. Even you cannot finish these other things, it’s not a problem as you already got success.
4. Work smarter, not harder. Good time management at work means doing high-quality work, not high quantity. Instead of being robotic in how you approach tasks, try to be thoughtful and always ask yourself if something can be done more efficiently or eliminated altogether. Managing time is not about squeezing as many tasks into a day as possible. It’s about simplifying your work, doing things faster, and relieving stress.  
5. Focus On One Thing At A Time. Generally, we aren’t very good at multitasking; because our brain takes time to refocus. Be focused on one task. Concentrate on this one task. Nothing else should exist. Immerse yourself in it. If you do have to do lots of different tasks, try to group them together, and do similar tasks consecutively. I try to focus on one thing at a time and be fully present in that. Even I am watching TV, I remain fully engaged on the TV.
6. Learn To Say “NO”. When someone asks you to do something you almost always say yes, it may be very noble in the implicit social contract. But it takes you away from your goal. Your objective should be to take on only those commitments that you know you have time for and that you truly care about. Don’t take on more than you can handle. If you are heading towards your goal, give a firm ‘NO’ to whatever comes in between. Or defer it to a later period. Part of declining/deferring to do things is focusing on your goals.  
7. Delegate everything you can.           We have a very arrogant and misguided perception that I’m always the person most qualified to do something, and that will get us into a ton of trouble. The most important thing is that, you don’t need to do all by you – someone else can do them for you. If there are things that can be better done by others, consider delegating. This takes a load off and you can focus on the important tasks. That will give you better success.
8. Sleep at least 7-8 hours. You may think sacrificing sleep is a good way to hack productivity and wring a couple extra hours out of the day for you. But, this is not the case. Getting the proper amount of sleep will help keep you alert and energetic, able to think clearly, and function at a high level. Research has proven that most people need 7-8 hours of sleep for their bodies and minds to function optimally.  
9. Leave buffer time in-between. Don’t pack everything close together. Decide beforehand for a 5- 10 minutes break and stick to that decision. Breaks clear your mind and refresh yourself to refocus. This also helps you wrap up the previous task and start off on the next one.
10. Eliminate the Procrastination/ Time Wasters.  Everyone procrastinates, at least a little bit. And researchers have theorized that we have different reasons for it. What does take your time away from your work?  Facebook? Twitter? Online Games? Or Phone calls? When you are working on something that needs your concentration for a few hours, you can turn off IM; put your phone on silent. When you remove these things what create the distractions, the distractions don’t happen nearly as much.

We get so caught up in busyness that we forget to enjoy what we’re doing. Even when we focus on working smarter, we’re still often too focused on getting things done. Remember one thing;

“Enjoyment should always be the goal. Work can be a play.”