A good time management habit will reflect your unique lifestyle and goals, but there are a few things to keep in mind: Writing things down makes them more concrete—have a to-do list, calendar, schedule, or something physical to note your goals daily and track progress. Break bigger tasks into smaller ones and set mini-goals on the way to your bigge

Since most of us aren’t even aware of how much time daily job maintenance takes up, Glei suggests doing a productivity audit once or twice a year: for a week or two, record what tasks you’re working on, for how long, and where the big distractions lie.

You may need to reconsider your environment. Does it have many distractions? If so, you need to rethink your work set-up. How you schedule your activities during a typical day is also important. There are times in the day when we are naturally more productive, and we should schedule our more demanding tasks to coincide. Our energy is finite, so we

The most common approach to increasing a manager’s productivity—his output over time—has been time-management techniques, which try to reduce the denominator on both sides of this equation. Any number of consultants will tell a manager that the way to higher productivity is to handle a piece of paper only once, to hold only stand-up meetings (which