Good time management skills is something that can make you into a successful professional regardless of the field you’re in.
However, managing your time effectively is particularly important if you want to be a successful language learner, and especially if you want to have a career related to languages.
Here’s why:
Time management will help you move towards your own language learning goals more quickly.
The better you get at the language your career is linked to, the more value you can add for the people you work with.
If you’re a teacher or a language learner, you will be able to structure your lessons in a way that provides the most value to you or your students, so that you or they can see the progress following each lesson.
If you’re a language blogger, you will be able to schedule your writing in, regardless of how busy you are, to maintain a consistent publishing schedule on your blog.
If you’re a translator, you will be able to organise your working time in a way that allows you to work when you’re at your most productive. You will also learn time-saving tricks when using translation software.
How to develop your time management skills
Learn to do the thing you need to do the most first.
What’s the thing that you absolutely need to do before you can move forward? Do just that and the next thing will follow.
Make scheduling things into a habit. Block out time to complete different tasks, based on when you’re the most productive.
Is it in the morning or in the evening? Schedule your most challenging work for then, and do other bits and bobs around it.
Set yourself deadlines. If you don’t have enough internal motivation to complete tasks, setting your own deadlines could be a solution.
Focus your effort on the things that add the most value. For example, if you’ve got to translate 20 pages of Spanish by the end of today, don’t get hung up on looking for a beautiful synonym of a word on page 1 for 20 minutes.
Leave that one out until the end – if you’ve got some time left once you’ve finished the 20 pages, you can do it then.
