6 Best Time Management Activities – The Ultimate Guide to Productivity

Did you know that, on average, people waste roughly 75 minutes daily on unimportant tasks? Time management activities are your ticket to reclaiming your diary and driving productivity. 

But with so many time management and planning approaches available, how can you discover the perfect process for you?

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most effective activities and highlight how they can help you take control of your schedule. 

Alternatively, you can learn more about these leading techniques and how to seamlessly slot them into your routine with our Time Management Training Course. 

Approaches detailed in the course help drive productivity, reduce stress, improve focus, and enhance your decision-making skills. 

TL;DR – Time Management Activities

If you don’t have time to catch them all, here’s a brief overview of the top time management activities that can help you gain more control of your task list simply and quickly:

Activity/Technique	Description	Who’s It For?
Eisenhower Matrix	Popular approach that categorises tasks by urgency and importance	Line Managers or business owners overwhelmed with tasks
Time blocking	Allocates time slots for specific tasks	Busy professionals juggling multiple roles, responsibilities, or tasks
The Mayo Jar	Visual representation of small, medium, and large tasks and how to prioritise them	People struggling to prioritise tasks
Ribbon of Life	Visual representation of how much time is attributed to certain tasks in your working week	Anyone seeking perspective on time allocation
£86,400 Challenge	Time represented as money to emphasise the importance of spending time wisely	Procrastinators or those struggling with time value
The Pomodoro Relay	Break work up into 25-minute sprints + 5-minute breaks to boost focus	Remote workers or those who struggle with distractions

To learn more about each of these leading techniques, speak to our expert team at TSW Training about how time management training could improve your approaches to boost productivity. 

TSW Training is a UK-based professional development specialist that has been providing tailored training to teams like yours for over 50 years.    

How to Develop Time Management Skills

When developing time management skills, it helps to be pragmatic about your workload. Find ways to work smarter by stripping away unimportant tasks and centring your energies on core roles. 

Here are some top time management tips to help you trim some of the fat from your task list: 

• Prioritise tasks: Think about deadlines and how much time each job will take. Give each task a score out of five for deadline and completion time, then order your list by prioritising the highest scoring tasks. 
• Take breaks: It may seem counterintuitive to stop working to improve productivity. However, the Harvard Business Review suggests taking short breaks regularly during your workday to boost efficiency.
• Reduce distractions: Phones can kill your productivity. Think about putting your phone in your bag or another room when working on complex tasks. Additionally, if your environment is distracting, think about logging some time elsewhere to improve your focus—maybe a library or quiet room in the office. 
• Assign tasks wisely: We’ll discuss this more in a moment, but the time blocking technique calls for task allocation on a structured basis. But to get the most out of the approach, recognise your most productive times in the day – then schedule tougher tasks for those periods. Likewise, think about targeting quick wins or tasks at times of higher fatigue. 

Effective Time Management Planning Techniques

Knowing how to manage your time effectively requires structured approaches, as well as a decent understanding of how you work best. Three leading time management and planning techniques can help you take control of your schedule: 

1. The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a decision-making tool that categorises activities based on urgency and importance in relation to your business or personal goals.  

Quadrant	Definition	Action
Urgent	Tasks that require immediate attention. These contribute significantly to your goals.	Complete immediately
Important, but not urgent	High-value tasks that contribute to long-term success but don’t require immediate action.	Schedule for a planned time
Urgent but not important	Tasks demanding quick action, but offer small long-term impacts.	Delegate
Neither urgent nor important	Unnecessary tasks that don’t contribute much value.	Eliminate

2. Time Blocking 

Time blocking is the practice of allocating slots in your calendar or diary for specific activities or roles, as opposed to working from a to-do list or passively responding to tasks as they come in. 

Effectively implementing time blocks includes: 

• Identifying key tasks.
• Group similar tasks together.
• Assigning specific time slots, e.g. 10:00 – 11:00: “Project Work” or 15:00 – 16:00: “Respond to emails.” 
• Account for breaks — including firm break periods in your calendar prevents burnout and helps maintain energy levels.
• Review regularly — set some time aside at the end of the day to review what worked and what didn’t. This is also a great time to plan for the next day. 

3. SMART Goals 

Setting SMART goals isn’t just for task completion and personal development. It can also be an effective technique for time management planning. However, to maximise performance, keep your objectives defined and achievable. 

For example: 

SMART Category	Explanation	Example
Specific	What do you want to accomplish?	“Increase blog traffic by 20% in 3 months.”
Measurable	How are you going to track progress?	“Write and publish two new pieces per week.”
Achievable	Is the goal realistic, given your resources & time?	“Improve website traffic by sharing new posts on social channels.”
Relevant	Align with broader personal or business objectives.	“Growing blog traffic supports overall business growth, strengthens brand authority, and builds awareness.”
Time-bound	What’s the deadline?	Three months.

Time Management Activities for Productivity

The statistics we mentioned at the start also found that 94% of people agree that better time management will increase productivity. 

However, increasing efficiency doesn’t need to involve huge introspective reviews. These useful time management activities are excellent at sharpening your organisational skills:

• The Mayo Jar Exercise: This activity uses a jar filled with rocks, pebbles, and sand. The rocks represent crucial tasks, the pebbles signify important but less critical tasks, and the sand denotes minor tasks.

Place the big tasks in the jar first, followed by the medium ones and then the small ones. This ensures you prioritise those important tasks before moving on to the medium ones. It also demonstrates that the “sand” can fit around those other larger “rocks.” 

• The Ribbon of Life: Imagine your entire workweek represented by a length of ribbon. The activity requires you to cut sections to reflect meetings, emails, projects, and personal time. What remains is the time left for meaningful, high-impact work. 

By highlighting how much of your working week is lost to unimportant tasks or unnecessary meetings, you can reprioritise your schedule accordingly. Research by Brother UK suggests office workers take 172 meaningless meetings each year. 

• £86,400: This unique challenge asks participants to imagine being given £86,400 every day and asking them what they would spend it on. The one rule is that any leftover funds will be lost. 

The figure represents the number of seconds in a working day and encourages participants to prioritise tasks to maximise their time. 

• The Pomodoro Relay: This popular time management task encourages you to split your efforts into 25-minute bursts, each followed by a five-minute break. The activity encourages the idea from Harvard Business Review we highlighted earlier, which suggests that taking micro-breaks throughout the day could be better for engagement and productivity. 

Each of these techniques can be a great way of improving your time management skills. But it’s important to drill down on the approach that works best for you.

Speak to our expert team today to learn more about how our time management course can help your team achieve efficiency.

Fun and Engaging Time Management Games

Organisation doesn’t always have to be about methodical approaches, strict discipline, and rigid schedules. Time management games are also great tools for building better habits. 

Whether you prefer video games, interactive challenges, or real-life exercises that subtly train time prioritisation, there is a collection of games that can help:

• Wanderstop: Perfect for professionals suffering from burnout as a result of insufficient break scheduling. This narrative game asks players to break from their task list to complete simple jobs like gardening, making tea, and tidying up. 

By subtly reinforcing the importance of rest, Wanderstop reminds us that productivity isn’t just about constant hustle—it’s also about taking time to recharge.

• Two Point Museum: Ideal for sharpening prioritisation skills or for leaders aiming to make better decisions. It mirrors real-life choice attribution as you run a museum, including everything from exhibit curation and guest satisfaction to managing staff and budgets. 

Whether you complete the tasks yourself or delegate them to colleagues, every choice you make affects the success of the attraction. The fun game improves strategic thinking while highlighting the importance of task prioritisation and delegation.

• Spirit City – Lofi Sessions: If you respond well to rewards for productivity, this game is for you. In Spirit City, you are assigned simple tasks. As you check them off, you earn rewards and attract friendly spirits. A great and subtle tool for anyone who struggles with focus and procrastination.
• Virtual Cottage: Virtual Cottage is a free online time management game. As a minimalist and distraction-free workspace, the game lets you: 
  • Set timers to better structure work sessions.
  • Play soothing music to create a more focused atmosphere.
  • Reinforces time blocking and goal setting by visually tracking progress.

• The 10-Minute Challenge: Designed to help anyone struggling to overcome the mental block attached to starting new tasks. In the challenge, you pick a task you’ve been putting off, set a 10-minute timer, and in that time, you get as much done on the task as you can. When the timer goes off, carry on if you’ve hit your flow or choose to take a break. 
   
• The Decision-Making Dice: If you find it difficult to prioritise your tasklist – or it feels like everything on there is urgent – then the dice game can help. This time management game is free and simple: 
  • Start with six pending tasks.
  • Assign each task a number from 1 to 6.
  • Roll a six-sided die.
  • Whatever number comes up, you MUST start that task immediately.

• The Delegation Game: No, it’s not a new family board game. In this exercise, participants are given a list of tasks and must choose to “Do it,” “Delegate it,” or “Eliminate it.” This reinforces the importance of not trying to do too much.  

How to Ace Time Management in Organisation Settings

Effective time management skills in the workplace can be developed over time. Enhancing these skills ensures you focus on high-impact tasks while minimising the impact of distractions. 

Here’s how you can implement this efficiency-improving skill: 

• Prioritise work strategically: Use frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to align tasks with company goals. Allow employees to attach tangible business benefits to their task list.
• Leverage time blocking: Set up shared calendars using tools like Google Calendar or Trello to allow managers and teams to check availability or schedule catch-ups around deep work sessions. 
• Reduce meeting count: Replace unnecessary meetings with tools like Slack updates, shared calendars, or dashboards. 
• Encourage delegation and collaboration: Encourage team members to work together on larger tasks to reduce project size and share responsibility. Delegating tasks can also aid collaboration and shorten task competition times.
• Foster a culture of efficiency: Improve your workplace culture by encouraging smart workload management through leveraging deep work periods and placing importance on taking regular breaks.

At TSW, we offer a range of professional training options to polish your team’s skills. Speak to our experts today to discover how tailored training can boost your team’s efficiency and performance. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

Here are some frequently asked questions about time management activities:

What Are the Key Elements of a Successful Time Management Activity?

A successful time management strategy should include: 

• Clear objectives: Focus on specific skills or outcomes such as prioritisation or delegation. 
• Practical application: Your choice of time management activities should help you apply the concepts in real-life.
• Engagement: Interactive elements like group discussions or challenges help to keep participants involved and engaged.  
• Actionable takeaways: Ensure you use tools or strategies that can be applied in your daily work. 
• Reflection: Schedule regular review sessions to overview what has changed and whether those alterations have improved performance. 

What Are Some Hands-On Activities for Teaching Time Prioritization?

There are many time management activities to help improve your organisational skills. But not all will be suitable for your personal way of working. If you prefer more hands-on solutions, these three are perfect: 

• The Eisenhower Matrix: Helps you become more organised by categorising tasks according to their urgency and importance. 
• Time blocking: Plan your day, week, or month by blocking out time slots for specific activities like focused work sessions, meetings/calls, and breaks. 
• SMART goals: Prioritise your workload by setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals for each task. 

How Can Time Management Workshops Benefit Employee

Leveraging time management workshops can have several cumulative benefits on your team. 

By learning more about organisational strategies through helpful workshops, like our industry-specific Time Management Training Course, your team can benefit from several enhancements, including:

• Boosted productivity 
• Reduced stress levels 
• Enhanced work-life balance 
• Increased goal achievement

Plus, from an organisational perspective, you help foster a positive business culture centred around personal development.  

Conclusion

Time management activities and games may seem like fun or lighthearted solutions. But the attributes and processes they sharpen offer a world of benefits — from workplace improvements like enhanced efficiency to more personal shifts like reduced stress and better work-life balance. 

TSW Training boasts over half a century of experience in delivering industry-specific professional development training, including leading time management courses.

Get in contact with our expert team today to find out more about how to unlock your productivity with improved time management skills.