1. Decluttering Your Brain

The first step towards freeing up brainpower to tackle the tasks at hand is to remove any sort of distraction that may be pulling our attention away from work. You don’t have to go full Marie Kondo on your professional life and ditch everything that doesn’t spark joy. But, cleaning up the physical and mental spaces you inhabit is an excellent start. Keep your desk clean. Organize your files so they’re easy to find. Get a notebook or download an app and create to-do lists at the beginning of each day. Even small things such as muting notifications can have an enormous impact on productivity, so do a little experimenting and find what feels right for you.

2. Scheduling Your Time

Calendars are simple and easy tools you should be making the absolute most of. As a recruiter, your workday will inevitably involve a lot of scheduling, and that can be difficult if you’re doing it off the top of your head. Just getting started with a free calendar app can be a great way to stay on top of all your tasks.
Most popular apps such as outlook and google calendar allow you to add important data to any type of entry, including location, participants, and notes. Some apps can
even automatically schedule events from emails or text messages, while others make it really simple to use voice commands. If you want to go the extra mile, try scheduling every part of your day – from your morning routine to your lunch break. It might just give you the organization you feel you’re lacking. And, for some added productivity, you can find handy extension apps that can help automate tasks such as invoicing the hours spent on a job or calculating the time you’ll need to set aside for your commute.

3. Breaking Barriers

More often than not, poor time management isn’t about skill, but rather about mental obstacles we create for ourselves. Procrastination, for example, is a difficult-to-break habit that stems from established behavioral patterns that have worked in the past.
But remember putting off a task doesn’t mean that we’re lazy. It means that we have negative connotations with that task. We might have a fear of failure, stressful past experiences, uncertainty regarding the outcome, and so on. As a result, our brain works to keep us in a safe zone by having us focus on easy things like watching YouTube videos or scrolling through social media.

Luckily, there are some great, effective strategies you can use to make yourself overcome these self-imposed obstacles.

• Try ranking your tasks by importance and start your day with the most difficult item on your to-do list.
• Eliminate tasks that don’t hold much importance. Often, they’re distractions.
• Schedule tasks such as answering emails, tracking expenses, and taking phone calls. With a stricter timeframe, you’ll be more likely to get them done quicker than usual.
• Delegate if you can.

If you have an employee or assistant who can take care of assignments that don’t require your expertise, you’ll effectively free up energy for those that do need your attention. You see, being organized isn’t about doing more. It’s entirely about working smarter, using the resources you have. Something else it’s also about? Self-care. Don’t forget the importance of sleep, nutrition, exercise, and healthy relationships. After all, these are the things that will give you the energy to work in the first place