Succeeding in all areas of life–personal and professional–depends heavily on an individual’s ability to manage their time effectively. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Many people try to juggle more than one task at a time, which can obviously lead to less than superior results in each of them.

When life gets busy, the first thing to go is usually the schedule. That’s when multitasking calls, and next thing you know, you’re either not meeting deadlines or not doing a proper job on those deadlines you’re meeting. If the above points sound like something you’ve had personal experience with, take heart! There are better ways to manage our time, and this e-book is a guide to doing just that.

Making choices is fundamental to the core of prioritization. It means optimizing your work by picking the most crucial goals and tasks. And it’s a skill we all need to sharpen to be successful in our work and personal lives. Why? Because the more you achieve, the more you really do matter. Christopher E. Smith’s definition of prioritization is “making judgment about where to direct one’s efforts and energy” and sharpening those efforts and energy; it’s at the forefront of effective decision-making. That’s why it’s important to spend some quality time at the beginning of a task or project to think through what is most important to do first.

Being good at prioritization means you can figure out which tasks are the most important and urgent and then give all your time and energy to those. It also means getting to know when “busy work” is creeping in and pushing that aside so you can concentrate on the tasks that really need doing.

People manage to plow through prioritization in all kinds of ways, but here are a few tried-and-true tactics we’ve seen and can recommend.

One way to boost the ability to prioritize effectively is by making a list of tasks to be done and then categorizing them according to their importance, urgency, or both, if they have either of those qualities. A tool that can be useful in this process is the Eisenhower Matrix. Named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, this system categorizes tasks into four boxes based on those criteria: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. Reviewing your priorities and making adjustments whenever necessary is yet another good way to ensure you’re directing efforts appropriately.

Create a structured approach to organizing.

Being organized means having a structured way of managing activities and being aware of what is happening all the time. It means being on top of things, being in control, and being in order. And organization comes naturally to some people. But it is most certainly a skill that can be learned by anyone who wants to be successful. The point is really missed when people say that being organized is just being a “neat freak” or is something that someone is just “born with.” And isn’t a well-organized environment the place we all would like to work in?

Improving organizational skills involves setting up a structure to handle tasks, files, and time. This structure could employ planners, calendars, project management software, or any combination of these tools. Commit to staying organized both physically and digitally in your routine. Using the same organizing tools each time guarantees that you will be able to efficiently locate information when you need it. The structure you create can also save time when it comes to locating your workspace or tools if you get in a habit of putting things away in designated places.

Balancing multiple responsibilities is the art of multitasking. Successful time management requires a person to know how to do this well. You can’t, for instance, stop answering emails, taking phone calls, or attending to board and committee meetings. But on the other hand, the complexity of all the stuff we started doing in the 21st century makes it seem that the only way to handle it is if everyone becomes proficient at the run-and-gun policy of the Wild West. Anything less, and you cave under the burden of unfinished business.

Juggling several tasks at the same time without sacrificing quality or speed is what multitasking is all about, and even those who do it well can’t always tell you how they do it.

Eric “Don’t Call Me Roger” Brehm, in a comment on work-life balance, notes that the key is to shift from one activity to another without skipping a beat, even though your brain (and your smartphone) might be telling you just the opposite. But again, even if you do that shift thing with a chromic regularity, does it amount to real multitasking?

If you want to get better at multitasking, try task batching. This is when you group similar tasks and do them all at once. So instead of checking your email, making a phone call, and then working on a report throughout the day, you set aside a block of time and do all of those right in a row. Why? Well, task batching definitely simplifies the art of multitasking. We all know that constantly switching from one task to another can leave us feeling scatterbrained—kind of like how you feel when you rummage through a bunch of random things for way too long. We don’t want that. We want the clear, cool ability to flit nimbly between tasks. Batching makes that possible.

Keeping to Schedules: Making Sure Work Is Done on Time

Time management is an important part of meeting deadlines. They come with the responsibility of completing a task within the time frame given. When managed poorly, it can not only reflect poorly on the work of a person but also on their reliability as an individual. That being said, consistently meeting deadlines can establish trust and conviction in a person’s professional persona as well as their individual work.

To enhance the chances of meeting deadlines, first become proficient in setting achievable goals. That means figuring out how to do the project in small, teachable parts—each with a deadline. These parts add up to the whole project. Each part is the responsibility of one or more people, and it falls due at a certain time.

The entire project—the “whole enchilada”—has a firm deadline. When you think of “backwards planning,” think of the final due date. Then think of the parts, the deadlines, the people—an entire, feasible way to get to the end. And if you fall behind in some part or other, be quick to say so. Don’t keep constituents in the dark about potential delays.

The process of making time management skills a part of your life and personality is called “integrating.” Although there are many useful skills that can help you in this process, two very basic and essential ones are learning to make a “to-do” list and learning to delegate.

Becoming skillful at time management requires you to meld prioritization, organization, multitasking, and deadline management into a single package. You have to be able to do all of these things and do them skillfully in order to be a good juggler of time. And how do you do all of these things? You don’t, at least not all at once. Instead, you do each thing as needed and you learn to alternate them so that the benefits of all of them are woven into the fabric of your daily life. Then and only then can you consider yourself literate in all the aspects of that bundle you can call “time management.”

To start, you need a solid group of aims and priorities. Also, you must arrange both your work area and workflow itself to best facilitate what needs doing. You should multitask, but do so intelligently, by alternating among various tasks that require different levels of mental energy. And regardless of whether you’re juggling a few or several responsibilities, you must figure out how to meet deadlines with your whole soul.

The constant need for change and the consistent striving for improvement are two essentials for today’s businesses and organizations.

Becoming truly skilled in time management is not a simple matter; it takes time and effort and is a very individual process. You cannot learn it from a textbook or lecture and immediately apply it with perfect success—time management skills are rooted in your individual processes and your framework for thinking. You can observe time management from outside and learn time management techniques someone else uses, but you must map them onto yourself and your processes and adapt them so that they serve you best.

If you always strive to improve and adjust, you can smooth and perfect your time management abilities, achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in both your personal and professional affairs. And the best reason I can think of to pursue this is that when you do, you achieve an unprecedented sense of poise in working through problems, actually going far beyond what used to be “good enough.”

In closing, the potency of effective time management lies in the positive results it produces. When a person effectively manages their time, they can achieve much. On the other hand, when a person frivolously uses their time, the likelihood of success is much lower. Effective time management enables a person to make the most of their 24 hours in a day.

Time management is crucial for success and happiness in both our professional and personal lives. We all have the same 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week, but why do some people seem to have all the time in the world while others struggle to accomplish anything at all? The key is prioritizing and managing our time well, and this can be done by utilizing four main techniques: organizing, multitasking, managing our time limits or deadlines, and practicing.