Setting daily objectives at your workplace is a good time management strategy:
a). Set your daily objectives, which should be defined and relevant to your job profile. Remember! These objectives should be stretched but yet achievable. The best way is to break these daily goals into parts of small manageable activities of shorter time targets, say – 30 minutes or an hour, because achieving these short –term milestones will motivate you towards to achieve your overall daily objectives.
b). Track your performance against these objectives at the end of the day. This will be useful for you to keep an eye on your progress towards enhancing work performance. For good results, you can also trace the performance of short-term parts by setting stopwatch on your cell phone for each hour. It totally depends on you on deciding the method you want to use to track your daily performance, but initially, you have to do it.
c). Take quick actions, while you notice you are off the target or not meeting scheduled time. Important advice: Try assigning tasks to achieve more in a shorter time.
Ways to improve time management?
As time management is so significant in everyone’s day to day life and is one of the vital areas of improvement for managers, now it’s time to learn the different ways to enhance time management with time management skills examples:
1). Do not postpone: Postpones decreases your productivity and increases the pressure level, especially when you are reaching to the deadlines. Hence, evade it.
2). Schedule yourself: As already, we have talked about the importance of daily goal setting, daily scheduling of your tasks will always keep you on track and enhance your time management practices.
3). Prepare – do list instead of To – do list: Often there is a misunderstanding between managers that time management is to manage the number of activities and multi-tasking. Let me clear that time management has nothing to do with multitasking, rather it is all about finishing your important tasks at a decided time frame. So don’t focus on unimportant tasks. Identify, which tasks are significant at that particular time frame and concentrate on those only.
4). Stay away from disturbances: Block out all the disturbances from your workplace, while you are at the workplace. This will keep you focused on completing your tasks.
Most of the project managers have the habit of checking emails or message notifications regularly during their job, which decreases their possible productivity. Always set sidewise a very shorter time frame out of your daily time management to check these messages and send replies. This time should not affect your productivity at any cost, while on task. Don’t check messages regularly, until or unless your work is to do the same.
5). Prioritize your tasks: Always follow the practice of prioritizing your tasks, as we have discussed above – unimportant tasks consume your energy and consume your time, which has to be dedicated for important and urgent tasks.
6). Distribute some tasks: Do not try to do everything by yourself. As a manager, you have to get your work done, but it does not mean you need to do all your work by yourself. Distribute some of the tasks to your subordinates or colleagues. Make your peers feel empowered. This will help you finish all your targeted tasks proficiently.
Some of the tasks may need special experiences. Do not feel shy to take the help of your peers or colleagues- an expert in that particular area. Some of the tasks may want only supervision from your side, do not get fully engaged in finishing these tasks.
7). Good housekeeping: Working on good housekeeping methodology such as 5S will keep you prepared and will help you save valuable time at your workplace. 5S, is Japanese methodologywhich consists of 5 stages in order starting each with “S”, – “Seiri”, “Seiton”, “Seiso”, “Seiketsu” and “Shitsuke”, which means, at your workplace:
- set everything in order,
- identify and tag everything,
- keep everything clean,
- practice the above each day
- standardize the above four as your daily routine in a well-organized manner.
Keeping everything managed and clean will save your time to access resources, whenever you want those urgently. A good example of “5S” practice is the supermarket.
8). Keep yourself stress-free: Avoid taking pressure and stress at your workplace. Stress ultimately decreases your productivity and substantially, also affects your health. It is always worthwhile to take a short break of 5 – 10 minutes, whenever you are at the activity for a longer duration. Enjoy every moment with your family and friends, whenever you are off work. Relax, be calm and re-energize yourself.
9). Keep courage to say NO: Many of the managers do not have the courage to say no while they are assigned to works beyond their limit or capacity. And they ultimately land up in taking high pressure, when they are not able to finish the tasks in time.
Hence, it is necessary to say “No” politely to further tasks being allocated to you, when you are already encumbered with work. Don’t make an impossible commitment.
10). Review daily progress: Keeping a record of your daily performance as decided is very significant to improve good time management skills. You can also track your tasks at different times in a day with the help of Time Management Chart. This is one of the most effective time management methods. In this chart, you are able to record your daily activities along with time consumed by these tasks. This will help you calculate your productive and non-productive time.
When you start recording your non-productive time, you get the opportunity to work upon to decrease or remove it. Post that revises your time management objectives to enhance your efficiency.