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by John Hall

Everyone is busy, and we carry our time-crunched schedules like badges of honor. People are moving faster than ever before, which means we’re not slowing down enough to determine whether the way we’re spending our time reflects our values.

As an entrepreneur, author, speaker, husband, and dad, I understand the value of time, and I know how we manage it is fundamentally important to our quality of life. It is why I co-founded a scheduling platform and why I am so often invited to speak on this subject.

Unfortunately, there is no catch-all cure for an overloaded schedule. Effective time management looks different for every person. The best schedule is the one that caters to your needs, so you should start by fully understanding what you most want—professionally and personally. Once you’ve identified those needs, use these tips to diminish the stress of a schedule that is frustratingly full.

1. Be smart about your calendar.

The power of the calendar is constantly underestimated. It’s easy to go through life just using your calendar as nothing more than a reference for your upcoming meetings and dates. 

Technology has transformed the potential of the calendar as it has transformed virtually every aspect of our lives. Smart calendar apps do more than just keep your schedule in one place. The right software can also give you a view into the schedules of others, making picking a date or time to connect easier than ever. Keeping an easy-to-read, dynamic schedule at your fingertips is the number one way to stay on top of your time no matter what.

2. Don’t be afraid to analyze.

In the past, time analysis has been a time-consuming task. Today, using those smart calendars, you have at your fingertips time analytics tools. At the press of a button, you can see exactly what sort of tasks are taking up most of your time. 

Though time analysis doesn’t offer any easy answer as to how you can maximize your time, it does give you a deeper sense of what your schedule looks like from a data perspective. Maybe you realize how much time you spend on the phone or how long you work in between breaks. Even small insights like these can go a long way in showing how you can make your schedule even more efficient. 

3. Prioritize your tasks.

One of the biggest enemies of time management is the abundance of small, mundane tasks that we all do every day. It’s increasingly difficult to do meaningful work when you’re bogged down with answering emails, making phone calls, and printing documents. No matter what sector you work in, you’re probably losing time moving from task to task without prioritizing.

It’s simple: Decide what work is most important for you to do first, then do it. This kind of prioritizing ensures that everything you need to do is done first, so the less critical tasks don’t interrupt your workflow in the present.

Prioritizing also prevents you from constantly moving from activity to activity, one of the biggest time drains. 

You can also take this strategy and incorporate it directly into your schedule. Divide your working day into blocks of time and assign each block a certain task. Work at each activity until fully completed before moving onto the next.

4. Focus on one thing at a time.

Though everyone seems to do it every day, multitasking remains one of the biggest drains on time and productivity. It’s impossible to complete something as quickly or as well as you would have if you had simply focused on one activity at a time. Focus is an integral part of working to your full potential, so compromising it in the name of doing more than one thing at once is a surefire recipe for wasted time.

The time-blocking strategy I mentioned before is great for staying set on one thing at a time, but there are other practical ways to go about that as well. The presence of electronics makes multitasking easier and more tempting than ever, so I like to follow a simple rule: If I’m not using a certain device specifically for whatever task I’m doing, I put it away. Simply removing the opportunity to get off track goes a long way in forcing me to completely address the task at hand before I move on at all.

I find that the principle of “one thing at a time” helps me maximize my time outside of work as well. Maintaining a healthy work/life balance leads to better work and higher productivity down the line, so it’s important to maximize your personal time as well. As easy as it can sometimes be to answer emails or check the news while you’re spending time with family, letting work creep too far into your personal sphere, or vice versa, can lead to lower returns on both your personal and professional satisfaction. Keeping things isolated, whether they’re individual tasks or entire parts of your day, is critical to getting the most out of your time and keeping your happiness level high.

5. List your time drains.

It’s simple but effective: Write down everything you feel like wastes your time. Whether it’s watching too much TV or lying in bed too long in the mornings, having your time drains written down on paper can motivate you to change things. 

Once you have them written down, turn your list into something actionable. Take on each time drain, one at a time, until it’s gotten to a manageable place that doesn’t plague your schedule. Once that’s done, move to the next item on the list, and so on. Trying to plug all of your time drains at once is going to be too large of a shift in your daily life to be sustainable, so tackling one issue at a time is the right way to free up more of your time without delivering a shock to your normal schedule.

6. Learn to delegate.

It does not matter whether you’re a one-person business or part of a massive corporate team—if you’re overwhelmed by your work, there’s almost certainly someone who can help you. An overloaded schedule usually means that you’re taking on too much work yourself, either because you think you’re the only person who can do your work, or because you don’t know anyone who can help you. Either way, it’s important to look for new ways to delegate to get more out of your time.

Your team will understand if you need help with your professional workload, and it never hurts to ask a family member to help if you have anything overwhelming in your personal life. Managing your schedule becomes far more achievable when you enlist help. 

Time management is an important aspect of being successful, no matter what you do. No one has more than 24 hours in the day, and keeping your schedule as well-managed as possible is the only way to free more time for yourself while still covering your responsibilities. Define your own needs, take a look at what’s on your schedule, and use these tips to liberate yourself from feeling overloaded. 

Hall is an entrepreneur, author, and speaker. He co-founded a new scheduling platform, , in order to help people get as much out of their time as possible. Find it at calendar.com. Hall will speak at the Marketing & Distribution Convention in November.