When you become a master with your time, you become a master at your job. Lack of time management strategies in the workplace is one of the most common causes of not meeting expectations and fulfilling obligations. Often this comes as procrastination, at other times it comes as not paying attention to the ever-moving hand of time. Time management is important not just as a great workplace practice but also as a great approach to life.
Time Management Strategies in the Workplace
Time management is important as it helps one achieve workplace objectives, apart from achieving such workplace objectives, it also leaves one with extra time to attend to other things. With this, one can see that an effective use of time will buy one more time; more time means more opportunities and even more rest.
Importance of time management strategies in the workplace
Managing one’s time effectively can come with numerous advantages. This includes:
- Healthier life: Time management will give one the opportunity to prioritize and assign time to important things. A lot of time is wasted doing things that may not add positive value to an organization or individual. When time management is applied, less time is used for unimportant things. This brings a healthier personal and social life. People begin to take you seriously and even begin to value you more because they understand what it means to spend your time with them. Regarding personal health, when you learn the art of time management and begin to deploy it, you will have more time to rest, sleep, and even cook and eat healthy meals. The way you use your time will eventually reflect in your personal life and organization.
- Discipline: The truth is that if you can rule your time, you can rule your life. Most things in life require time. If you decide not to make time for smoking cigarettes, you find yourself not smoking cigarettes. You become more disciplined when you begin to be accountable for your time.
- Increased Productivity: When you manage your time appropriately, you become more productive. A lot of time is spent unproductively. Time management makes you productive and in most cases even more effective. Although Parkinson’s Law (not a proven scientific law) talks about work expanding to align with assigned time, its reverse is possible. You are more likely to achieve an objective within a timeframe if you assign such responsibility a certain amount of time.
Now let’s talk about how you can effectively manage your time in these seven simple approaches.
| Strategie | Activities |
|---|---|
| Identify Responsibilities | Identify your daily tasks and routine activities |
| Activity Analysis | Identify how you spend time and what you spent it on |
| Timetable Creation | Create a timetable in line with your daily responsibilities |
| Prioritizing | Adjust your productivity timer to fit the timetable |
| Task Organization | Endeavor to arrange things properly and attend to tasks serially |
| Rest and Recreation | Eat, recharge and shun distraction |
Rest, procrastination, timetables, priorities and more, Here are time management strategies in the workplace that have proven effective over time.
6 Proven Time Management Strategies in the Workplace
- Tasks Identification – Identify Your Daily Responsibilities
- Activity Analysis – Identify How You Have Been Spending Your Time
- Timing – Create a timetable in line with your daily responsibilities
- Prioritizing – Adjust Your Productivity to Fit the Timetable
- Task Organization – Endeavor to Arrange Things
- Rest and Recreation – Shun Distraction
Identify Your Daily Responsibilities:
The first step to take in time management strategies is to identify what you have to do each workday. Although in most organizations, this can be very tough to decide, it is important to work out a responsibility list.
You need to take note of your break time, you need to know what has to be done before that break time and you need to create a 30-minute gap or a reasonable amount of gap for each work episode. In this case, everything being equal, you should finish your first task 30 minutes or so before the next one, it may seem complicated at first but remember, once you have set your mind on that, you see yourself achieving it.
Identify How You Have Been Spending Your Time:
To be able to make a difference, you need to identify what has been taking your time, it is one of the key time management strategies in the workplace. Examine the things taking your time, are they part of your workplace responsibilities as identified in step one? If they are, can those responsibilities be done in a way that can be faster or more effective? But some of the things you spend time on are not part of your daily responsibilities.
Do some of the things you spend time on that are not part of your daily responsibilities have to give way? Do they need to be assigned less time? or completely cut off? When you identify what has been taking your time, you will be able to decide if such activities or events need to continue taking your time. In summary, cut off unimportant things that you have been spending time on.
Create a timetable in line with your daily responsibilities:
Having identified your daily responsibilities in step one, it is now important to assign a sufficient amount of time to each responsibility. In most cases, you will have more than enough time to finish your workplace responsibilities but on several occasions, workers can be overloaded and that’s when you may need to talk to your boss.
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If after a thorough analysis of your workload; it is obviously not accomplishable within the timeframe allotted to it, discussing the situation will be a great step in ensuring that either work time is expanded, an extra hand employed, or a compromise is reached.
Adjust Your Productivity to Fit the Timetable:
Your timetable is like a guideline and without adjusting productivity accordingly, you may not be able to fall into place.
- Don’t lump tasks together:
While trying to save time, it may be tempting to try multitasking but that can get things confused and sometimes counterproductive. Finish one task before starting another or if you want to start another task before finishing another ensure to leave the other task halfway not trying to do both at the same time.
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When you finish one you can get back to the other. Multitasking and time management don’t always work together. Two tasks may take 30 minutes each but doing both at the same time doesn’t guarantee that you will finish both in a shorter time; sometimes it may even take longer than doing them separately.
Making a timetable and outlining responsibility is not enough, it is making an effort to accomplish objectives within the set time that matters. At first, it may feel tough but with time it becomes a routine and you find yourself accomplishing responsibilities easier and faster each time.
Endeavor to Arrange Things:
A clumsy workplace, scattered files, and an unorganized office can be a time killer. Sort your items properly and ensure everything is in easy-to-find places. Pens can be kept in a cup, books on the shelf; still the books can be sorted according to their types and so on.
This makes reaching for items and finding things easier. When things become easy to access or find, time is saved. The power of arrangement goes beyond sorting items, sorting tasks by grouping similar tasks together or in proximity can also help in time management.
Shun Distraction:
In the age of the internet it is easy to get distracted, watching a video on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube doesn’t seem like the right thing to be doing with your workplace time. If you can’t resist the urge, turning off your mobile data or Wi-Fi would be a great way to avoid being distracted by notifications from these platforms.
Perhaps you need to make use of your internet while at work, turning off notifications for those apps will be great. Time management requires discipline. When you discipline yourself and identify what matters most, you can use your time more strategically.
Conclusion
In the United States and many other countries where hourly pay is ideal, managing your time effectively can leave you with extra time. It starts with your personal life and then your workplace. There’s always a meeting point between workplace and personal time. If they are not properly sorted from the beginning, one risks taking more time off the other or even presenting with clashing activities.
Summarizing our 6 proven time management strategies in the workplace; while time remains the same every day, how we manage it can impact our daily results. Strategic time management is the first step toward a life of accomplishment.