How To Manage Your Time Effectively

Project Management / By

There are times when you find most of your resources are constantly struggling to meet the deadlines, as a result they start sitting late to complete the work. If this is happening quite often then it is a matter of concern and should be addressed on priority. It’s worth stepping back and taking a different approach of doing your work.

Try to identify the reasons first
  • Do you plan your work a week or a month back or do you do it every day.
  • Do you prioritize your work or just do it the way it was assigned to you.
  • Are you bad at saying no to your friends and colleagues for the unplanned support or help required by them?
  • Are you occupied with a lot of small tasks, which are eating a large amount of your productive time on a regular basis?
  • Are you more than 100% occupied?
  • Are there any weak areas where in you are taking more time than the expected time?
  • Are you poor at planning and estimating your work?

Make a list of above questions and see if there is any room for improvement. If you prioritize and plan your work a week or a month ahead, then half of your problem is solved. For the rest of it you require to learn the project management and time management skills.

Use time management skills

Plan your time in such a way that you succeed in balancing the conflicting demands of time for critical projects, team performance review, team support, self-grooming and many necessary and unnecessary meetings. Time management skills are valuable in managing a project and in many other aspects of life: from managing your day to managing your vacation. In case of tight timelines or when the due date is very near you have to combine the pressures of intensive work with right set of resources and good management of time.

Try the below listed tips
  • Checkout what is most important for the day? List down top 3 most important task of the day, then plan your day accordingly.
  • Follow focused approach- Try to focus on the actual goal and concentrate on one thing at a time. Be fully engaged in your current work only. Don’t try to do 2-3 tasks together as multi-tasking is not everyone’s cup of tea.
  • Organize your mails so that you can use of your mail box in a better way- Spend some time in managing your email and mail folders. Having an empty inbox relieves the work pressure by a great extent.
  • Avoid switching from one task to other – Every individual gets interrupted with a phone call or an email, or an SMS, it distracts him/her from his current task. The time it takes to get re-focused on what he/she was doing is lost, useful time is wasted. So try to make an effort to eliminate those distractions.
  • Make appointments with yourself –This may sound crazy but if you spend few minutes to review your own goal sheets, it helps you to work in a better and planned way. Scheduling appointments with yourself really works, especially if you receive a notification of the same on your email.
  • Delegate some of your work –This one has been one of the toughest thing but extremely helpful. People with the perception that no one do that work better and try to do everything themself only. This leads to a lot of trouble and even if it were true, that doesn’t mean you do it yourself as excess work impacts the quality of work. So start delegating some work to your team members.

It is recommended to manage your time in such a way that you are able to achieve most of the work planned, by the end of the day. Keep 10% of your time for adhoc urgent tasks. This can be done by prioritizing – focusing on urgent and important tasks over those that are less important, making list to remind you of what you need to do when, and organizing your work schedule.

About Aditi Malhotra

Aditi Malhotra is the Content Marketing Manager at Whizlabs. Having a Master in Journalism and Mass Communication, she helps businesses stop playing around with Content Marketing and start seeing tangible ROI. A writer by day and a reader by night, she is a fine blend of both reality and fantasy. Apart from her professional commitments, she is also endearing to publish a book authored by her very soon.

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