1 Time management is essential in our high-speed, always-on culture, yet most advice you'll find on this topic is pretty vague. 2 "Setting goals" and "making time work for you" are great, but so are practical efficiencies. 3 This is the core idea: where possible, working a single task to completion is more efficient. 4 When you sit down to work, you spend a few minutes just getting "settled in" before you're productive. 5 If you jump from task to half-finished task all the time, that's a lot of minutes lost to "rolling up your sleeves."