Event coordinators rank fifth among the 10 most stressful jobs in 2017, according to CareerCast, which listed enlisted military personnel, firefighters, airline pilots and police in the top four spots. One big component of the stress load for event organizers is time management. There are only so many hours in the day (and night), and that may not be enough to juggle the multiple demands that meeting planners, who are very often a team of one, need to meet.

To get a better grip on time management and productivity, here are some simple tips from Thomas Oppong, a frequent writer and blogger on this subject and author of the e-book The Power of One Percent Better: Small Gains, Maximum Results.

1. Separate your urgent tasks from the important ones. When your tasks are separated this way, you are more likely to give attention to them and get them done as soon as possible. Keep in mind that choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing where to focus.

2. Practice saying “no.” Choose your work and projects carefully. Focus on projects that are mutually beneficial to you and the other party. Find tasks that energize you and light you up, and say yes to those. Be ruthless.

3. Break big projects into small tasks. Take a few minutes to think through that big project. What are its component parts? What will be the real effort and time required? Write it down. Then start working on the component parts. When the overwhelming work becomes something small that you can focus on, you can single-task and crush long-term goals.

4. Define what your ideal day would actually look like. With that scenario in mind, you can then divide the day into sections and match to-do list activities to different times.

5. Schedule everything on your calendar. This enables you to better determine which projects to take on and whether you should be saying yes to more tasks in any given week.

6. Block time to focus on emails, social media and notifications. You will see a drastic improvement in productivity when you clump these activities into one time block or several scheduled time blocks for the day.

7. Allocate blocks of time for different modes of thinking. Our brains have two modes. When you are doing creative work, learning something new or working on your most important tasks, you are in the “focused” mode. Your brain assumes “diffuse” mode when you are relaxed, taking a walk or daydreaming. Studies have shown that activity in many regions of the brain increases when your mind wanders. Your brain solves its difficult problems while you daydream. In fact, the brain switches back and forth between these modes regularly. Learn to take advantage of these shifts.

These tips are excerpted from two Oppong posts on Medium, the online publishing platform. See the full articles here and here. — Regina McGee