How to Save Time: Best Strategies and Tools to Boost Productivity

The phrase ‘time management’ is somewhat misleading. In reality, you can’t manage time, but you can manage your choices around it. 

No matter how much you want it, you only get 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds each day, and that number never changes. What you do with that time depends on how well you plan, evaluate, act decisively, and stay honest with yourself. Just like money, you either have to spend time with purpose or let distractions steal it right from under you.

In this article, we’ll explore how to save time, boost productivity, and protect your peace of mind while you’re at it. Plus, we’ll introduce you to the one magical tool to improve your time management skills—from time-blocking and time-tracking to smarter planning: ClickUp! 

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Why Saving Time Is More Important Than Ever

Every choice you make with your time shapes what you accomplish and how satisfied you feel each day. If you learn how to manage your daily or weekly schedule properly, you can binge-watch your favorite show, spend time with your family, or dive into deep work without missing a beat.

Mastering time management allows you to accomplish important tasks and still enjoy a whole night’s sleep, highlighting the importance of time management more than ever.

1. Lowered stress levels

Ever get that panicky feeling at 4 p.m. when you realize you’ve barely scratched the surface of your to do list and you’re losing track of time? That creeping sense of dread is precisely what smart time planning helps you avoid. 

When your tasks are clearly laid out and spaced over blocks, you are giving your brain a map instead of dropping it into a maze. You’re not frantically reacting to everything, but you’re calmly moving from one thing to the next.

2. Improved decision-making abilities

When every minute feels urgent, decision-making becomes survival mode: quick, messy, and often wrong. But what if you had time carved out to actually think? Not in between meetings, not while replying to texts, but real, undisturbed time. That’s where time blocking comes in. 

Want to compare three vendors for an event? Book a 45-minute decision block. Need to weigh pros and cons before a big career move? Give yourself space to breathe and reflect. By planning your day around deep work blocks, you address one of the biggest time management problems many people struggle with.

3. Boosted productivity

Being busy isn’t the same as being productive. Effective scheduling helps you prioritize what matters and avoid burning energy on low-value tasks. Finishing a report when your brain is fresh means fewer errors and edits later. You’re using your peak hours wisely. 

Try timing yourself on regular tasks, such as a slide deck, a write-up, or a customer follow-up. You’ll be shocked at how much time you end up losing to distractions or indecision.

4. Additional free time

Free time doesn’t magically appear, but you have to earn it through clarity and pacing. When you know what your day looks like, you stop overcommitting or stretching one task into three hours. That means you finish to do list faster and find yourself with those rare open pockets of ‘bonus’ time. 

5. Increased focus and concentration

If you want a longer attention span, it’s important to actively protect your deep work periods. Think of your brain like a spotlight, which can only shine brightly on one thing at a time. When you keep switching tasks, it’s like flipping that spotlight in every direction, and it weakens. 

So, close the tabs, silence the phone, and dig into one task. You’ll notice you finish faster and better. With consistent practice, your attention span improves. Your work becomes tighter, cleaner, and more thoughtful. And yes, you’ll even start enjoying the process.

6. Balanced work and personal life

‘Work-life balance’ sounds great, but what does it actually look like?

It’s not about splitting your day evenly, but more about designing your time both professionally and personally. Maybe that’s wrapping up by 6 p.m. every day so you can cook dinner peacefully. Or skipping late-night emails to read with your kid. 

Whatever balance looks like for you, planning your time helps protect it.

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Top Ways to Save Time at Work and in Life

So, how do most people handle their time? 

• 33% write to do lists
• 24% check their inbox for what’s next 
• 12% rely on their calendar for everything 

Lastly, 25% “just deal with whatever seems most important at the time”. 

*shudders*

You might think you’re doing okay, but that kind of approach often creates hidden time management problems. You waste time switching tasks, reacting to chaos, and losing momentum all day. If you want a smarter way to work, personalized time management techniques help you organize better, focus faster, and free up more time without burning out.

Top performers use executive time management to take control of their day and accomplish more without increasing their workload.

And they don’t do it alone. They use ClickUp, the everything app for work, to keep every task, doc, chat, and goal in one place, so priorities stay clear and work stays on track. Let’s see how. 💪🏼

1. Use time-blocking to schedule focused work

Your brain thrives on structure. Time-blocking offers your mind a roadmap, eliminating the need to decide what to do next every few minutes. 

📌 Say you block 10:00 to 11:30 for report writing—not just generic “work,” but one specific task. During this period, close your inbox, silence notifications, and focus on the task at hand. You minimize the mental energy spent on task-switching and enhance the quality of your work.

To do this right away, you can use time blocking templates to plan your day around your energy levels and stay motivated throughout. 

Get free template

The ClickUp Daily Time Blocking template is a great way to organize key tasks and clearly structure your schedule. 

With time blocking, you can:

• Focus on your highest-priority tasks during your most productive hours
• Keep distractions out by parking less important thoughts in designated slots
• Prevent burnout by applying realistic time estimates that match what you can actually complete in a day

💡 Pro Tip: If manually blocking time for every task seems overwhelming, try ClickUp Calendar’s AI-powered suggestions to automate the process. It also lets you schedule tasks into time blocks by dragging and dropping them from your priority or backlog list into your calendar. 

2. Group similar tasks together to reduce switching

📌 For example, Ferriss shares how he only checked emails once a week. Even if this meant losing out on two sales totaling $80, the ten hours he saved were worth $200 to him. That gave him a net gain of $120, along with the mental clarity to focus on more meaningful work. 

Batching was not just about getting more done. It gave him control over how he spent his time.

3. Set clear daily priorities

Effective time management starts with setting clear priorities. When you prioritize and batch tasks based on their importance, you can tackle your most urgent tasks first, reduce stress, and complete high-priority tasks without distractions.

To prioritize, identify time-sensitive or impactful tasks and complete them before moving on to others. 

ClickUp Tasks help you organize different tasks with key details, such as descriptions, deadlines, and attachments, so you stay on top of your workload.

Once organized, use ClickUp Task Priorities to sort your work. Label each task as ’Urgent’,  ‘High,’ ‘Normal,’ or ‘Low’ priority to easily visualize your focus areas and keep your attention on high-priority tasks.

To set priorities across your Workspace, switch between different ClickUp Views for a better perspective on your tasks. Here are three examples:

• Task View: Click the flag icon in the top-left corner of the task window to assign a priority
• List View: Find the priority flag in the Custom Fields located to the right of each task
• Board View: Hover over the lower-left corner of a task card to bring up priority settings

After assigning priorities and due dates, head to ClickUp Calendar View to manage your schedule, filter tasks by priority, or make bulk edits with ease.

Need tips on smarter prioritization? Check out this video:

4. Eliminate distractions

To improve time management, you must tackle distractions head-on. Identifying what pulls you away from your work is the first step. Once you identify your distractions, take action to limit them during your workday.

Similarly, ClickUp Project Time Tracking gives you insights into how much time you spend on different tasks, making it easier to analyze productivity and manage projects effectively. You can start and stop timers directly within tasks, log time manually, or connect with popular time-tracking tools like Toggl and Harvest.

And if you ever need a quick start, ClickUp’s ready-to-use templates can always save you a significant amount of time and get your projects up and running faster.

5. Create timelines

Timelines help project managers and individuals visualize progress and stay aligned with key milestones. Instead of generic tracking, leverage established tools and methodologies to build structured, actionable plans.

Here are a few widely used frameworks for timeline creation:

• Critical path method (CPM): Helps identify the longest stretch of dependent activities and the minimum time needed to complete a project. This is key for optimizing project duration and highlighting tasks that cannot be delayed
• The Eisenhower Matrix: While not a timeline tool in itself, it helps prioritize tasks by urgency and importance. You can use it together with a weekly or monthly timeline to stay focused
• 12-week year: A personal productivity framework that replaces annual planning with focused 12-week cycles, helping you set goals and timeline them for quicker execution and review

Using these frameworks, you can structure both team-based and personal timelines grounded in strategy, not just to-dos.

💡 Pro Tip: Sort tasks by urgency and importance using ClickUp’s free Eisenhower Matrix Template.

Get free template

6. Take breaks at regular intervals

Breaks aren’t a waste of time; they’re an underrated productivity strategy. Methods like the Pomodoro technique structure your work into focused intervals (typically 25 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break), helping you maintain concentration and avoid burnout. After four cycles, a longer break (15–30 minutes) helps reset your mental energy.

The best part? Pomodoro apps can help you stick to this routine and track your progress.

7. Prepare ahead

When preparing ahead, you don’t always need to rigidly schedule every minute. All you’ve to do is think strategically about your day. Look for natural opportunities to combine tasks or align them for efficiency.

📌 For example, if you have an appointment across town, plan nearby errands, like picking up dry cleaning or grocery shopping, on the same trip. Before heading out, jot down exactly what you need to avoid wasting time. This kind of foresight helps reduce backtracking, lowers mental load, and frees up more time later for rest or focus.

8. Build a designated workspace

To boost productivity and reduce context switching:

• Set up a fixed location: A spare room is ideal, but even a consistent corner of a room works. Avoid working from your bed or couch, as Cal Newport (Deep Work) warns that blurred boundaries kill focus and prolong other tasks
• Use physical cues: Add a desk lamp that you turn on only during work hours, or a specific mug or notepad. These become psychological triggers for ‘work mode’
• Minimize clutter: As Greg McKeown explains in Essentialism, mental clarity starts with physical clarity. Keep only the essentials on your desk: laptop, notebook, pen, and water
• Enforce shutdown rituals: When the workday ends, pack away your gear or cover your workspace. This habit helps your brain disconnect and prevents overworking, which is key advice from Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism

Even in small spaces, consistency and cues matter more than size. A simple setup used intentionally can dramatically improve your ability to focus and save time.

9. Use AI for microproductivity

Microproductivity focuses on working smarter, not just harder. AI-powered tools can automate routine tasks, organize your workload, and summarize key updates to take busywork off your plate. 

ClickUp Brain 

ClickUp Brain, an advanced AI-powered and context-aware productivity assistant in ClickUp, helps you manage your work better by handling repetitive tasks:

• It can instantly summarize long comment threads, meeting notes, or documents, so you don’t waste time parsing through information
• You can ask it questions about any task, doc, or project to get quick answers without hunting for context through scattered tools and threads
• It can even generate subtasks, update task descriptions, or rewrite content based on your goals—saving you the mental load of starting from scratch

ClickUp Autopilot Agents

ClickUp’s Autopilot Agents are intelligent, AI-driven assistants that autonomously manage tasks and workflows within your workspace. 

They operate based on defined triggers, conditions, and instructions, allowing them to perform actions like creating tasks from meeting notes, summarizing complex documents, or providing contextual status updates. 

These agents can be deployed across various locations in ClickUp, including Spaces, Folders, Lists, and Chats, ensuring seamless integration into your team’s workflow. 

There are two types of Autopilot Agents: Prebuilt and Custom. 

• Prebuilt Agents are ready-to-use and can be activated with a single click, handling common tasks like answering frequently asked questions or generating weekly reports
• Custom Agents, on the other hand, can be tailored to your specific needs using a no-code builder, allowing you to define unique triggers, conditions, and actions. For example, a Custom Agent can be configured to respond to HR-related queries in a Chat Channel, providing accurate information based on the knowledge it has access to

ClickUp AI’s interactive Q&A, AI-powered chat, and task creation features benefit in-office and remote teams. Brain and Agents eliminate back-and-forth communication and ensure everyone stays informed with minimal effort.

10. Learn to say ‘no’

When work starts piling up, stress increases and productivity drops. You need to recognize your limits and set boundaries. 

Saying no to additional tasks becomes crucial when you already have enough on your plate. Most managers will appreciate your honesty and directness. It’s part of their role to ensure workloads are manageable for everyone. 

As long as you communicate clearly and respectfully, saying no won’t be an issue.

11. Set yourself shorter deadlines

Ever notice how a task that should take an hour somehow stretches into an entire afternoon? That’s Parkinson’s Law in action: Work expands to fill the time available.

📌 For example, a project that was expected to take several days can often be completed in just a few focused hours when a tight, realistic deadline is set. By setting shorter, realistic deadlines, you create just enough pressure to keep yourself motivated and avoid procrastination.

12. Automate repetitive tasks

If you find yourself repeating the same actions, an automation tool can help you get rid of the redundancy. ClickUp Automations eliminates the need for repetitive tasks. Instead of updating task statuses or reminding team members about deadlines, automated workflows keep projects on track without disruptions.

ClickUp also boosts collaboration with threaded comments and @mentions, ensuring seamless teamwork and keeping discussions and feedback tied to specific tasks.

With ClickUp’s Assigned Comments feature, you can turn comments into actionable tasks and notify the assigned team members instantly. The comment will appear in their ‘comments and mentions’ sections on the home page, making sure it doesn’t get missed. 

Once they finish the task, they can resolve the comment to prevent unnecessary follow-ups.

You can use this to:

• Explain task instructions
• Address issues with proper context
• Attach relevant files or links for sharing information
• Tag team members to grab their attention

13. Use a project management tool

Switching between disconnected apps causes ‘toggle tax,’ which wastes time and adds mental strain. Jumping between project management tools, note-taking apps, and communication platforms fragments tasks, making work inefficient and slow.

ClickUp eliminates this problem by bringing all your tasks, docs, goals, and chats into one platform. ClickUp’s Time Management features combine key project management capabilities with advanced planning strategies to help teams increase productivity and meet project goals.

ClickUp Time Estimates helps teams set realistic expectations for task duration, which is key for planning and meeting deadlines. This feature lets you:

• Set SMART goals with ClickUp Goals to track progress and meet deadlines
• Balance and manage team workloads effectively to maintain productivity

You can also use ClickUp Goals to set different types of targets, including numerical, monetary, and true/false. This flexibility gives you complete control over goal-setting based on your team’s needs.

For example, a sales team can set revenue targets, while a content team can track article production. Time management goals help maintain focus and accountability, building a culture of achievement.

Here are some more ways in which ClickUp helps you save time:

1. Efficient task scheduling

• Start & Due Dates: Assign specific start and end dates to tasks and subtasks, ensuring clarity in timelines
• Due Date remapping: When a task’s date changes, ClickUp automatically adjusts the dates of related subtasks, maintaining project alignment
• Drag and drop scheduling: Easily reschedule tasks by dragging them across the calendar, facilitating quick adjustments
• Reschedule Task Dependencies in ClickUp: Modifying a task’s due date automatically updates dependent tasks, preserving workflow continuity

2. Comprehensive time tracking

• Time Reporting: Generate detailed reports on time entries for analysis and optimization of time spent
• Timesheets: Create customized timesheets for any date range, grouping time entries by tasks or users
• Billable time: Mark time entries as billable, simplifying invoicing and financial tracking

3. Resource management

• Workload View: Monitor team members’ assigned tasks, points, or hours, ensuring balanced workloads and preventing burnout
• Gantt Charts in ClickUp: See the full project timeline with all tasks, subtasks, dependencies, and milestones in one interactive chart. Gantt view includes progress indicators, critical path highlighting, and dynamic filtering by assignee, priority, or Custom Fields—so you can instantly understand where things stand and where to focus your time

4. Time and progress reporting

If you use outdated reports to track progress, they’ll lose relevance the moment you generate them. ClickUp Dashboards update automatically as work happens, so you always have the most current information at your fingertips.

For example, let’s say you’re managing a product launch. Your ClickUp Dashboards can display:

• Sprint progress across multiple teams
• Resource allocation and team capacity
• Budget tracking with burned vs. remaining hours
• Risk indicators based on task delays or blockers

ClickUp also provides multiple ready-to-use templates for setting deadlines, assigning tasks, and tracking progress. These templates help keep your project on schedule and within budget.

For example, the ClickUp Time Management Schedule Template transforms how you and your team handle daily tasks. It helps your team use time efficiently and meet deadlines effectively. 

Get free template

With this template, you can:

• Visualize daily or weekly tasks quickly, making it easy to organize and schedule project activities
• Set specific, measurable, and achievable goals so every team member knows what to accomplish and when
• Clarify task priorities and deadlines, tracking each team member’s workload in one view to avoid confusion

This template simplifies project planning and keeps your team focused and on task.

Here’s what Mahinur K., Unbounce CRO Specialist, had to say about ClickUp saving their team time.

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Time-Saving Habits to Practice Daily

Effective time management comes down to the habits you build every day. The small actions you repeat can either hold you back or set you free. 

Here are some time-saving habits you can incorporate into your routine to boost productivity and make the most of your time:

• Start with the most challenging task, aka, eat the frog: When you get the tough stuff done early, you feel a sense of accomplishment, and you can coast through the rest of the day with more ease
• Use the ‘Two-Minute Rule’: If a task takes less than two minutes to do, do it right away. This works for small, quick tasks like replying to an email or making a phone call
• Focus on one thing at a time: Multitasking can seem like a time-saver, but it usually ends up being counterproductive. Commit to single-tasking, where you focus on one task at a time until it’s complete. You’ll finish faster and with better results
• Create daily routines and stick to them: Having set routines for your mornings, evenings, and in-between can save time you’d otherwise spend deciding what to do next. Make a checklist of your daily tasks and follow it consistently to reduce time spent figuring out what to do next
• Use keyboard shortcuts: Instead of clicking through menus, learn the shortcuts for tasks you do frequently. It cuts down on clicks and streamlines your workflow
• Limit decision-making time: Every decision takes time and mental energy. Practice limiting how long you spend deciding on things. The fewer decisions you make, the more energy you have for important work. For example, plan your meals for the week, lay out your clothes the night before, and limit your options for daily tasks. 
• Set boundaries for interruptions: Make a habit of setting boundaries with people and technology. Let others know when you’re unavailable for chat or unnecessary meetings. Turn off notifications during focused work time and set specific periods for handling emails and messages

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Reclaim 52 Days a Year with ClickUp’s Smarter Time Management

Effective time management isn’t about meeting deadlines, but reclaiming your day and boosting productivity. In fact, when you switch to an all-in-one project management tool like ClickUp, you can save up to one full day every week, equating to 52 days annually.

93% of organizations feel they’re falling short on productivity. 

ClickUp consolidates automation, timelines, and communication, helping teams stay aligned and efficient. With tools like time tracking and integrated task management, you can prioritize tasks and stay better organized.

Want to know how to save time yet get more done? Start using ClickUp for free today!

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