Time management at work is one of the main concerns employees have. It often happens to people who have little time to perform their professional tasks or cannot distribute the time they have available for the tasks they have to perform. Or both.
If you find yourself in this situation right now, we have outlined five simple tips that you can follow starting tomorrow so that time management at work does not get in the way of your duties and responsibilities.
Time management at work: how to do it
1. Keep a planner
The first thing you should do if you want to learn how to improve your time management at work is to have an overview of the tasks you have to perform concerning the time you have to do it.
Have a planner/calendar suitable for the different tasks you have to do throughout the day, both outside and inside work. It has to be helpful so that it allows you to access your day quickly and easily and gives you a clear and orderly view of what you have to do each day and each week.
Review your planner at the beginning of each week and, of course, at the beginning of each day: remember that you write everything in it because you can’t remember everything you have to do, but you can remember to check what you have written in it.
2. Distribute your time efficiently
If you still aren’t sure how to improve time management at work, keep reading. Now that you have your schedule divide your workday into blocks according to your plan each day. You can reserve the first block of the day to check your social media and personal mail. Then you can move on to check your work email, and then you can get on with each day’s tasks depending on the order of priority or what’s on the schedule.
Make sure you set aside at least one moment each day for a break to get up, have a snack, chat with colleagues if you are in the office, or clear your head and stretch your legs if you’re at home.
3. Keep noise and other distractions away
No one can manage their work time optimally if they have a thousand flies buzzing around them. Keep distractions away, both on your computer and at your desk.
If it’s not entirely essential, don’t have WhatsApp or your social media open on your screen. It is always a temptation to look at those tabs now and then, especially if they are just a click away.
Keep your desk tidy and clear. That will generate a work environment instead of a sense of chaos or disorder. Moreover, listening to music while working is sometimes possible but a real distraction for some tasks: especially when dealing with important matters, make sure no external factors prevent you from giving them your full attention.
4. Separate tasks
If you have several commitments to attend to during your day in meetings or calls, try to distribute them in a balanced way throughout your schedule. Leave a space of time between one call and another, do not cram your tasks together.
It is essential that, when you are meeting someone, you can do it calmly, not thinking that you are about to be late for your next meeting. It is also important to be able to reset yourself between conversations, go to the restroom, drink water, and review the objectives of the task you have to face next.
Piling up tasks, meetings and calls do not necessarily lead to higher productivity but instead to stress and lack of concentration— an inadequate response to time management at work.
5. Quality over quantity
Optimally structuring the workday in terms of raw results can take away the qualitative part of those results. However, whenever you can, value the quality of the work over the accumulation of prepared content or ticking the boxes on your to-do list.
Urgency often forces us to solve tasks, make decisions or produce whatever we have to do in less time than we would need to do it. Alternatively, we may be in more hurry than we would like to do the work and, therefore, demand more creativity from our brains than the quality of the results we sometimes deliver.
At other times, this urgency or haste does not exist. If you have to do a job right now, do the best you can with your available resources. But if you can do a job with more care, precision and thoroughness, try to take the time you need to do it that way.
You will probably produce less (in quantity). Still, you will undoubtedly produce more (in quality) and with a level of psychological strain that is much easier to cope with and a higher level of satisfaction with yourself and your performance.
Emotional well-being program for companies
At ifeel, we know that work should not disrupt people’s well-being. Our team of psychologists, experts in well-being at work, has created an emotional well-being program for companies that positively impacts talent retention, reduces absenteeism, and combats employee stress.
In our Resources section, you will find helpful material, such as podcasts, HR guides, or interviews with HR managers. In addition, we have a Psychosocial Risk Factors Template, which you can use to comply with the requirements of the Labor Inspection.
Thanks to our emotional well-being program, your company’s HR managers can receive personalized, data-driven advice on improving the psychological well-being of their teams. In addition, this program offers employees a 360° mental health care service structured at different levels according to their needs. Try our program today to see how it could help you.
We hope you found this post about time management at work interesting. If you would like more information about our emotional well-being program for companies, request it, and we will contact your team as soon as possible.
