Best time management hacks while working remotely

If your to-do list is getting longer and longer and you don’t know where to start, you feel like me and I’m sure like many others out there. What could be helpful for you is a better system to prioritize your tasks, like a decision support for what to do next. So here is time management hack number one!

To make better and easier decisions and to focus on the right things, the Eisenhower Matrix is a good method. It’s said that it was invented by the 34th president of the USA (guess his name 😉) and helped him to evaluate decisions based on importance and urgency on a daily basis.

Now you may not be a president, but you’re supposed to set big goals, so today we’re going as high as we can 😉.

The Eisenhower Matrix consists of the four fields:

• Do first
• Schedule
• Delegate
• Don’t do

By dividing your tasks into these four points and determining what you have to do, what you should do later, and which tasks you can delegate to others, you get rid of endless lists.

In addition, you also specify what you are not going to do. This is very important, because you eliminate these issues from the beginning, instead of carrying them around with you all day, knowing that you won’t get to them anyway! ✅

Do you prefer some more explanation? Here’s a short video guide of the Eisenhower matrix.

Actually, there wouldn’t be any stress at all if we didn’t put things off all too often until we suddenly run out of time. But who doesn’t know it, sometimes we just can’t manage to do everything immediately and put off supposedly important things. And then it becomes stressful.

Do you also get tired of this? I’ve gotten into the habit of using the Pomodoro technique to divide my day into small slices as often as possible – just like cutting a tomato into slices. After each slice or time unit you take a short break 🍅 and after several slices you take a longer break 🍅🍅🍅.

A pomodoro cycle:

• 25 min — Work
• 5 min — Break
• 25 min — Work
• 5 min — Break
• 25 min — Work
• 15 min — Break

With the help of the Pomodoro technique, you divide your day into meaningful time slots that are long enough to work productively and, above all, focused on a task, but short enough to be able to perform several repetitions of the time slots.

There are some great pomodoro timers out there and I can highly recommend Pomofocus.io, which is really a great and free to use software for time boxing your day.

Task prioritization and focus time are important when it comes to working effectively and efficiently. But when I work and travel as a digital nomad, I also need to be organized.

My 3 best time management hacks when I’m traveling and working:

Getting up early

Getting up very early and traveling before I start work, for example. An hour or two on the road before I start my workday help me to change location without being stuck in rush hours.

Another advantage of getting up early is the fact that you can start working very early. My energy level is high in the morning and I love the feeling to tick off things before lunch. Gives me freedom for unplanned tasks in the afternoon. 😉

Meeting buffer

Scheduling meetings with enough buffer. Since I don’t always know what the Wi-Fi or mobile network will be like at my next work location while traveling, I usually plan enough time before meetings to be able to look for an alternative location if necessary.

Set focus time

Instead of jumping from one task to another, I set focus times. Sometimes these are in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. But always these blocked and meeting free times are at least 2 hours long. Extremely productive in combination with the Pomodoro technique.