The Magic of Time Management for Smart Managers
How Time Mangement skills can be learned and enhanced?
Time management strategies help you handle work you’ve been assigned to within the time you have.Working as a manager, you may be assigned to a different number of tasks each iteration. You need to plan, manage and track your team’s work, too.
Meetings, estimations and planning, communication with clients and your team, reporting to the management. Ideally, you want to accomplish all that during your work day.
What is Time Management?
Generally speaking, time management is how we use the time we have to reach our goals or finish the tasks we’ve been assigned to efficiently.
1. Plan your work ahead
Knowing what you want to accomplish in a specified timeframe already sets you up for success. Planning your daily tasks may be as simple as creating a to-do list consisting of must-haves and want-to-haves. When planning for several projects, though, having a high-level project plan will improve visibility of requirements across different assignments, but also help to establish goals and requirements for each project.
2. Set clear priorities
Sometimes a list of things you need to do may seem overwhelming. To make it manageable, it’s better to divide your to-do list into smaller chunks. Setting clear priorities will help you order your tasks according to their importance, urgency and effort needed to accomplish them.To distinguish important and urgent tasks from your to-do list, you mayorganizing your tasks into four categories:
Important and urgent – these are the tasks you should do first
Important but not urgent – tasks you can schedule to do later
Not important but urgent – if possible, you may delegate these tasks
Not important and not urgent – you can skip tasks falling into this category
3. Focus on one task at a time
While some praise multitasking, it appears to make more harm than good.Doing several tasks at once is ineffective and inefficient. As human brain needs time to switch from one task to another, trying to do too many things create a lag time, when we’re actually not being as productive as we might want to be.Instead, try to focus on one task at a time and complete it, and after that switch to another one. This way, especially if you give yourself at least few minutes of rest between assignments, the transition is smooth and your brain is ready to take on a new task.
4. Minimize interruptions
Interruptions you need to get rid off may come from emails, calls, colleagues or chat conversations. It may be tempting to check your inbox every once in a while, get involved in an office small talk or hang out with your team on a chat. But truth is, it kills your productivity.Distractions are what drives us away from work. Minimize them and you’ll see how easier it is for you to focus on completing a task.
5. Set yourself shorter deadlines
if you have more time to finish a task than you actually need, the chances are you won’t do it any quicker.What you can do about that, is actually setting yourself shorter deadlines. If you will still struggle to force yourself to finish a task faster, ask someone from your team to review your work at a certain date, so you now have to do the work in order to show them results.
6. Learn to delegate
It’s actually advised to find the tasks you can delegate, so you can focus on more important and urgent ones.To spot available team members with skills needed for a specific task, use resource allocation tool. Delegating work you may actually show your employees that you value their input. Empower them to make decisions and, if needed, limit yourself to supervise them. This way you not only have less on your plate, but let your subordinates grow professionally, too.
7. Learn to say no
Knowing your limits when it comes to the amount of work you’re able to finish in a given timeframe is very important to not only deliver what you’ve committed to. It also helps to avoid work-related stress and, eventually, feeling burnt out.Saying no to your supervisor, manager or even boss may be intimidating, but there are ways to do it politely and assertively. As you don’t want to be viewed as the one who refuses to work, showing why you can’t take on more tasks or negotiating over deadlines may help you to reduce the number of new assignments.
8. Summarize each day
Keeping daily summaries of your work helps you to discover where you did well, and what remains to be done.At the end of each day, take a look at your list and check the tasks you’ve completed. Seeing what you’ve managed to accomplish is a great way to get motivated for the next day.If there are still unresolved tasks on your list, ask yourself why you haven’t finished them and find solutions to that. Maybe the task was to broad and dividing it into smaller assignments will help you better organize work.
