How to Stay on Top of Things: Tips That Will Change Your Life
If you’re here, you’re either not merely happy with how you’re managing your priorities, or you’re the type A who is always looking for perfection.
I’ve got both of you, as I’ve been in both boats: I’ve had incredibly strong self-discipline and was smashing through my tasks with ease, and I’ve also been paralyzed by the feeling of watching tasks pile up without control.
However, even though it’s not easy, I want to help you as much as possible. Therefore, I came up with a list of hacks to help you stay on top of things by planning your day productively.
How to stay on top of things – key takeaways:
Some of the actions you’ll need to take in order to stay on top of things are:
- Minimize meeting overload by questioning every invitation, requesting agendas, and advocating for meeting-free days.
- Tackle your most challenging or important task first thing in the morning when your energy and willpower are highest.
- Focus on one task at a time, as multitasking reduces productivity by up to 40%, and it would fragment your attention.
1. Plan your day deliberately
Starting your day without a plan for tackling your most important tasks will take you wherever the current takes you (mostly urgent tasks), not necessarily where you need to go. However, successful people consistently attribute their achievements to a deliberate time management plan.
You don’t need to implement rocket science strategies. Some simple tweaks to your task management will do wonders. Here are some tested strategies:
Create a plan for your day
Spend 10 minutes at the end of each day reviewing your schedule for tomorrow, write down your priorities for that day, and decide if there’s a particular task that can be delegated to someone else to ease your list.
Too tired to plan in the evening? Switch to each morning! As a writer, I’ve found that spending 15 minutes each morning planning when I’m well-rested transforms my productivity. I identify the three most critical tasks that I have to complete, and I schedule them into specific time blocks in my calendar before anything else can claim that space.
Not sure how to identify your priorities? Check out our article on prioritizing tasks, and you should learn how to get clarity in that pile of deadlines.
Assign specific time blocks for your to-do’s
In the same way, you protect your energy, you should protect your time on your priorities so you don’t get carried away by other tasks and the notifications that appear on your computer screen instead of working from a traditional to-do list that doesn’t account for time constraints. Block your calendar into focused segments: deep work on task 1, deep work on task 2, meetings, emails, and admin tasks.
2. Do the hardest task in the morning (Eat the Frog)
When you finalize your hardest task first, everything else feels way easier by comparison. Your willpower and mental energy are highest in the morning, and this makes it the ideal time to face your challenges head-on.
The Eat the Frog method originated from Mark Twain. Mark Twain’s metaphor for tackling the hardest tasks at the beginning of your day is a great reminder of how when it’s best to deal with hard stuff:
If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
Identify your frog
Decide which is your most challenging or important task for the day. You can get clarity on this by asking yourself some of these questions:
- Which activity requires the most mental energy and focus?
- Which responsibility would create the most problems if left undone another day?
- If I could only complete one task today, which would have the biggest positive impact?
- What single task would make me feel most accomplished if completed by day’s end?
- What work do I dread starting but know would create momentum for the rest of my day?
Start working on your frog within the first hour of your day, and stay focused on it until you’ve made meaningful progress.
3. Track your time and manage it
Most people dramatically underestimate where their time actually goes. Without objective measurement, we navigate our workday based on flawed perceptions rather than reality. Research done by Udemy shows we lose nearly 2.1 hours daily to distractions and inefficiencies we’re not even aware of. Time tracking reveals the surprising gap between how we think we spend our time and how we actually spend it.
Beyond simply identifying your time-wasters, tracking reveals your unique productivity patterns and optimal work rhythms. Some people achieve peak cognitive performance in the morning, others in the late afternoon or evening. Some can keep their focus for 90-minute stretches, while others work best in 30-minute bursts. Without data, these personal patterns are hidden, preventing you from aligning your most important work with your natural energy cycles.
How to implement effective time tracking:
- Use an automated tracker: Install an app like EARLY that captures your digital activity patterns without requiring manual input but provides you with unbiased data about where your time actually goes.
- Review weekly reports: Do you feel like your entire week has slipped through your fingers, and you don’t know where it went? Do a quick time audit every Friday for 15 minutes to analyze where your time went, looking specifically for the difference between your perception and reality. Such a productivity tracker will reveal all you need to know. Here’s an example of how simply analyzing your calendar view in the time tracker reveals what you spent time on:
- Identify time leaks: Look for unexpected patterns or activities consuming excessive time. It’s quite clear that in the above image, this team member has spent way too much time on admin and meetings, leaving too little time on QA and email.
- Make data-driven changes: Based on these objective evidence, not perceptions, make some tweaks to your work habits. Redesign your workflow and minimize the identified inefficiencies. The simplest thing for the above example is for this person to say no to more work or unnecessary meetings in general, so they can focus more on what moves the needle.
EARLY makes time tracking easy. Join for 30 days for free and build your time tracking habit with ease
Of course, you’ll need to constantly measure your progress based on some baseline metrics in your key areas (meeting time, focus work, email processing) and track changes as you implement new strategies.
💡 Pro Tip: Not sure what time tracking actually means? Time tracking is a systematic process of recording how much time you spend on various tasks throughout your workday. It’s best to track your time with specialized time trackers, as these are not interfering with your day to day work.
4. Stay away from multitasking
There’s more and more evidence showing that multitasking affects productivity. This context-switching is counterproductive because our brains are not built to truly perform multiple tasks simultaneously.
This comes with a cognitive penalty each time, as our brain needs time to adjust to a new task, and our productivity drops by 40% when attempting to juggle multiple complex tasks, according to the American Psychological Association.
Work in single-task mode
To make your to-do list manageable, you need to take it one task at a time. Focus on one activity from your task list until you manage to complete it, or set a stopping point when you take a quick break and check other tasks or go for some fresh air.
Close unnecessary tabs and apps, and put your phone out of sight to keep your focus only on single-tasking and prevent attention fragmentation.
Use a Pomodoro timer
I have to admit that this is one of the best focus techniques for me. I do a couple of things that make me successful with this Pomodoro technique:
- I set my phone on Work mode so I don’t get distracted by anything
- I set a small goal for these 25 minutes. An example is for me to write this entire paragraph on multitasking until the timer ends.
- I start the Pomodoro timer for 25 minutes, followed by a 5-minute break.
- Sometimes, I use my noise-canceling headphones and play in the background some binaural beats on YouTube or a playlist with ADHD relief music.
- I let everyone know I’m in focus mode, whether I’m working in a coworking space or at home.
Why does it work? I’d say it’s a perfect combination of elements that make me be productive:
- Time pressure and a clear deadline of 25 minutes;
- I have clarity on the goal that I want to reach, which is small (this is super important), so it seems achievable, and I’m not overwhelmed by a big task with loads of steps in between (that would be the entire article, the research process for my article, and so on).
- Also, when I have music, I don’t hear any sort of noise around me to distract me, as well as my colleagues, so I’m even more focused.
💡 Pro Tip: Looking for other strategies to stop multitasking? Use task batching, a method that groups quick activities like responding to messages into dedicated time blocks to reduce context-switching when you’re working on bigger tasks.
5. Limit distractions
Our workplaces seem engineered for interruption. Between notification pings, email alerts, and sensational news, your attention is constantly fragmented. Managing these interruptions is pivotal for staying on top of your responsibilities.
Some ways to limit distractions are the following:
- Set email boundaries: Constantly checking your email without acting on them is not helping in any way, but it stresses you out and frustrates you. So, instead of reactively checking emails, create a structured approach that protects your focus on work. Check messages at scheduled times throughout the day, such as at 10 AM, 1 PM, or 4 PM.
- Create phone notification tiers: Set up a custom “work mode” that only allows urgent notifications to appear on your screen. These could be from your key contacts, both personal and at work. Also, you can set time-based notification rules differently. For example, in the morning, from 7-10 AM you could get only essential calendar alerts, during work hours like 10 AM-5 PM, get only priority-based notifications, while in the evening allow only personal communications.
- Practice “interrupt coalescing”: It’s easier than it sounds, but its fancy name comes from computer science, and that’s how our computers work. It means that you batch and deal with all interruptions in certain buckets based on priorities. If you have resources to handle them, you tackle them at the moment,t and if not, you add them to a queue. Our CTO is the perfect example of grouping interruptions at work:
“As a CTO and head of product, managing a broad spectrum of tasks is crucial. To maintain productivity, I structure my day with a consistent routine: I dedicate mornings to deep, focused work on high-priority projects and reserve afternoons for communication and addressing urgent matters as they arise.” Manuel Zoderer, CTO, EARLY
6. Say no to more work
Oftentimes, a better productivity skill isn’t what you do, but it’s what you deliberately choose not to do. If you take on more work on top of your existing projects, you’re jeopardizing your progress on everything.
So, you need to say no to new requests that don’t align with your priorities, which is essential for staying on top of things.
A simple framework to use in saying no is the following:
- Assess new requests objectively and address them: Evaluate if these new projects align with your current priorities and capacity. Don’t leave these hanging, as a quick no is better than a delayed yes.
- Explain briefly without over-apologizing: Share your context but avoid lengthy justifications, still, remember that it’s important to add background to your refusal.
- Offer alternatives: Suggest different timelines or other resource allocation, a redistribution of priorities or suggest someone else to take on the project.
- Practice the “yes and” technique – “Yes, I could help with this project, and to do so, I would need to postpone the quarterly report. Which would you prefer I prioritize?”
- Use the “opportunity cost” framing: Help others understand what would be sacrificed if you take on their request. Here’s an example of saying no to a current client:
” Hi (name),
Your campaign idea sounds great. However, I just checked our calendar, and I’m afraid finishing it next week is not feasible due to the following:
- We generally need 2 weeks from concept to implementation for such a campaign like yours;
- If we rush your campaign, we will do you a disservice if we execute it within this timeframe, as the results would be mediocre.
We really want all of our client projects to be successful, so I suggest rethinking the deadline by two weeks. Happy to jump on a call to explain our process and find a solution together.
Let me know your thoughts, ”
7. Protect your energy
Did you notice that you have time to do things, but you no longer have the energy to smash your work goals?
That’s because you haven’t optimized your mental and physical energy. Even with perfect time management, depleted energy reserves will undermine your ability to stay on top of things. Unlike time, which flows constantly, your energy fluctuates throughout the day based on biological rhythms, nutrition, activity levels, and psychological factors.
Let’s explore some ways in which you can optimize your energy:
- Take intentional breaks: Step away from your work completely for 5-10 minutes every hour using techniques like the Pomodoro method mentioned above.
- Prioritize sleep quality: Aim for 7-9 hours of consistent sleep every night, and try to keep the same sleep and wake times even on weekends. If you don’t get enough sleep, feeling overwhelmed and easily distracted can be a norm in your day to day.
- Implement energy renewal practices: Incorporating quick breathing exercises (like box breathing: 4 counts in, 4 holds, 4 out, 4 holds) or 2-minute meditation sessions between your tasks do wonders. My favorite mindfulness practice is a 10-minute meditation called Yoga Nidra. It’s not a yoga practice but a meditation for your nervous system that restores your energy and calms your nervous system.
- Align tasks with your energy levels: Schedule your most demanding work during high-energy periods like mornings and routine tasks during energy dips.
💡 Pro Tip: Feeling your energy fade throughout the day? Discover proven reset techniques and energy management strategies in our guide on how to stay organized at work when overwhelmed.
8. Minimize meetings
Meetings steal a staggering portion of your workday, often with questionable returns but with high inputs most of the time. The inputs required are preparation time, mental transitions before and after, and the disruption of deep work cycles.
Also, did you know that the average worker spends 21.5 hours weekly in meetings? Moreover, 71% of these are unproductive meetings, so these don’t lead to good progress on your task but get you tired.
Let’s explore some ways to reduce your meetings:
- Question every invitation: Apply filters to determine whether your input is necessary, whether these meetings could also be async, and whether they contribute to your priorities. Make a decision of joining or not after you’re running them through your filters.
- Leave unnecessary meetings: If you discover during a meeting that your presence isn’t adding value, politely excuse yourself and your mental health, too.
- Ask for no meetings day: At EARLY, we have a “No meeting Thursdays” practice, and it’s incredibly helpful, as we know we have an entire day for deep work. Implement this within your team, or ask your manager to consider it.
Find out exactly with our automatic time tracking tool. Discover the surprising gaps between your perception and reality, then reclaim those hours for meaningful work.
Other tips to implement
- Set goals and celebrate accomplishments
Your goals are like your North Star you need to always look at, as it holds the truth of your path. Otherwise, it’s impossible to know if you’re staying on top of things. Create short and long-term goals so that you know what you have to achieve both in the short and in the long run. The small goals will act like checkpoints to track progress along the way.
- Create celebration rituals
Your accomplishments deserve a celebration. Develop meaningful ways to acknowledge achievements, no matter how small. At one of my previous companies, we had a “Friday wins” – a brief session where we would share our accomplishments for the week. That felt great as we created a great cultural accountability around progress.
- Remove all time wasters
Identify and eliminate activities that drain your time without contributing to your goals or well-being. This includes excessive social media scrolling, inefficient workflows, perfectionism on low-impact tasks, and disorganized workspaces.
Combat these by implementing organized file naming systems, “good enough” criteria for tasks, and notification-free focus periods. Even small environmental factors like a cluttered desk or insufficient lighting can waste time by creating distractions or causing eyestrain. Conduct a personal time audit to identify your specific time drains, then create targeted systems to minimize or eliminate them.
What is the best way to stay on top of things?
It depends on your preferences! But if you didn’t know how to stay on top of things, now you have a list of tips that will help you be more productive.
Simple things like taking breaks, doing that difficult task first thing in the morning, or keeping your workspace clean will make a huge difference in your productivity. See which one better works for you and your profession. Soon enough you’ll see positive results both in your professional and personal life.
With time, organizing your agenda and to-do list will be much easier and you’ll be able to enjoy work a lot more!