"Time Management Part 1" covered the basics of creating, categorizing, and prioritizing an Everything To Do list; this week, we'll take a look at some simple time management techniques you can use to work through your list and make the most efficient use of the hours in each day.

Focus on your priorities first
At first glance, this sounds overly obvious: our highest priority tasks should be the ones we attend to first and most often. As many of us will admit, though (myself included), this isn't always the case. Often, the things we most want or need to do get pushed aside by distractions, procrastination, or simply a lack of time.

The solution to this challenge is to consciously map out your week so that you have adequate time each day to devote to your most important tasks. For many of us, this takes some doing, especially if we're used to trying to shoehorn tasks and activities into schedules that don't necessarily have room for them.

For example, three of my priorities are growing my business, keeping fit, and doing a certain amount of writing each week. This means that I need to find room on my calendar for the tasks that will support these priorities. Rather than loosely planning to get to each of these tasks at some point throughout the week, my challenge is to set aside specific chunks of time for them: Tuesday morning is my networking time; on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, I go for a run, and do an exercise video on Thursday and Saturday; and Sunday and Tuesday are my writing days.

Look over the activities you identified as priorities on your Everything To Do list and decide on specific times during the week you can focus on each of them; enter these times on your calendar as appointments with yourself (or with others, as needed), then stick to them. Let the other tasks in your week fill in around your priorities, rather than vice versa.

Learn to combine and divide (and conquer)
As you saw when creating your Everything To Do list, tasks and activities come in all different sizes: some (like making a phone call or writing an e-mail message) are small and simple, while others (like planning a vacation, researching home improvement projects, or writing a complex report at work) are much more involved and are bound to take more time.

Another successful part of managing your time is to learn to combine or split tasks into reasonable chunks. For instance, rather than peppering phone calls you need to make and e-mails you need to write throughout your day, try setting aside a block of time--perhaps 30 minutes or an hour--to do them all at once.

On the flip side, rather than trying to stare down a large, multi-part project, divide it into separate tasks and then attack them one at a time: instead of trying to plan a vacation in one fell swoop, for example, start by making a list of where you might like to go, doing some online or library research on each destination, choosing one, researching airfares and hotel rates, and so on. Knowing that each task has a specific start and end point can make the overall project much easier to handle.

Aim to beat procrastination
Even the best laid plans and the most meticulously scheduled days can easily be thrown off track by one of time management's biggest foes: procrastination. As with stacks of paper or piles of laundry, tasks we put off dealing with don't go away; they build and build until they threaten to overwhelm.

There are many reasons behind procrastination, and a discussion of them is beyond the scope of this tip. (Julie Morgenstern's Time Management from the Inside Out offers some great insights into why we procrastinate.) However, it's worth developing a general awareness of the things you tend to put off, and then asking yourself what's behind the delays: are the tasks tedious to you? Do you worry that you won't be able to do them well enough? Are you waiting on someone else in order to finish something? Does a certain task or activity seem to lack a clear purpose or point?

Cultivating an awareness of why you procrastinate is an important first step in beating the desire to put things off. Start paying attention to what you feel and think when you skip over certain tasks on your To Do list, and then aim to find the encouragement and motivation you need to actually get them done.

For the next few weeks, commit to using an Everything To Do list and the basic time management skills covered here to make your days more effective, to avoid cluttering your schedule with unimportant tasks, and to devote time to the things that are most critical to you. As with other organizing tasks, good time management takes some practice to become a habit, but the payoffs--less stress, more control, and increased efficiency--are well worth the effort.