Time management is a skill every employee needs to master to increase efficiency at work. Employees with poor time management skills are prone to miss deadlines, disappoint clients, increase overtime costs, and reduce overall productivity.
Are you looking for ways to improve your time management? Continue reading below for management skills that work for employees.
Why Do you Need Time Management Skills?
We all have twenty-four in a day, and it’s not counter-intuitive to wonder why you need time management skills, especially when there’s no instant magic to automatically increase the number of hours you have in a day.
It’s true, time doesn’t change for anybody, and you need to understand this before you can manage your time well. However, what you can do is to optimize your time towards achieving specific goals.
Besides meeting your deadlines, there are other benefits you stand to gain. These include better task management, better work-life balance, higher productivity, and a significant reduction of stress levels.
7 Time Management Tips for Employees at Work
- Discover where you misuse time: this is the first step towards perfecting your time management skills. A lot of people waste time without realizing it.
Do you want to manage your time? Then find those areas, habits, and activities that steal your time, eliminate them, and you’ll discover that you have more time in your hands to invest productively.
An effective way of removing time wasters is setting time management goals. For example, you can aim at avoiding social media and answering personal messages while working. As you work consistently at achieving your time management goals, this will ultimately change your time-wasting behavior.
- Plan and set goals: the best way to maximize your time is to set goals. This can be daily, weekly, or monthly goals. To increase productivity, your goals should be measurable, specific, realistic, and achievable.
In addition to setting goals, also set a time limit for achieving your goals. Then, plan on how you’re going to make them happen. You can prepare by drawing a timeline and breaking down each goal into small achievable tasks.
You can also consider getting an employee time management tool. This will help you keep track of your activities and also promote responsibility.
- Prioritize: The importance of prioritizing cannot be stressed enough. Start each day by making a priority list based on importance and urgency.
How many tasks do you have at hand to achieve urgently? Your urgent and most important tasks are the highest in your priority list. They should be the ones that you do first.
Here’s a sample of how to create a priority list.
- As mentioned, start by recognizing the dos – tasks that are both important and urgent.
- The next priority one on the lists is important but not urgent. These tasks can be placed on a schedule where you find time to work on them.
- The third type of task is the ones that are urgent but not very important, which is something you can delegate.
- Last but not least are tasks that are neither urgent nor important. They’re time-wasters. The best thing you can do is to remove them from your list and schedule.
As an employee, always ensure that your priority list is in line with that of your company or department goals per time.
- Delegate and outsource: the secret of time management is that you don’t have to do everything yourself. Delegation can be hard, especially if you’re a perfectionist.
Instead of worrying if other people will do your work well, think about the time you can conserve and invest in other productive activities when you delegate and outsource.
- Create a routine: creating a system is necessary for organization purposes and particularly useful during crises.
Instead of wasting time away and jumping from one activity to the other, an established routine will get you started on achieving your goals right away.
- Maximize peak performance period: People are wired differently. Find out what time you are at your best; this is your peak performance period.
During this time, you tend to achieve results faster, with little or no stress. Place challenging and more essential tasks towards this time to take full advantage of your peak period. This simple trick can shoot up productivity like never before.
- Reduce or eliminate multitasking: A lot of employees take pride in their ability to juggle several tasks at once. This trait is quite desirable, but in the long term, destructive.
Juggling many things at once will increase your stress level and ensure that you’re always burn-out at the end of the day. Accumulated stress can affect your health and productivity in the workplace.
Conclusion
If you’re going to excel as an employee in your workplace, learning time management skills is a must-do. These tips are easy to do. Practicing them consistently is sure to bring the desired results.
