Work Better, Faster, and Stronger: How to Improve Time Management at the Office
Time management is always a hot topic for professionals. New software and tools are constantly created to optimize working time or improve productivity and time tracking. There’s also endless content available discussing the very nature of time management both personally and professionally. From self-help books to podcasts to your favorite influencer, nearly everyone has some advice to offer regarding effective time management. In this whirlwind of information, it can be difficult to sift through all the noise and get to the true meat of the matter.
The Indeed Editorial Team suggests, “Effective time management can increase productivity and ensure your priorities are correctly planned out. There are different strategies you can use to manage your time effectively. Good time management is an essential skill that takes practice to develop.”
Optimizing time management will look different depending on the person and their profession, but there are a few key areas we can all examine to improve our time management at the office. Let’s dive into expert suggestions for optimizing time management in your professional life.
Look at Personal Time Management First
Before you can optimize your time management in the office, you must take a look at time management in your personal life; the two skills are directly correlated. If you can practice effective and successful time management in your personal life, this will likely carry over into your professional world.
“Time management isn’t an 8-5 job,” says Christy Pyrz, Chief Marketing Officer of Paradigm Peptides. “It doesn’t start and stop when you leave the office. It’s a skill you must cultivate day in and day out to be successful at it.”
There are plenty of ways to practice time management in your personal life. From maintaining a regular sleep schedule to balancing how much time you spend on your hobbies versus your friends and social activities, there are several areas to examine in your life to assess what needs to be changed. If you don’t juggle these aspects of your life in a balanced manner, it might be hard for you to practice time management in a professional context.
Learn How to Prioritize
Keeping a daily to-do list of all the tasks daily or even weekly tasks you need to complete is only useful if you know which tasks to do first. If your tasks run the gamut from scheduling a meeting to finalizing a project deck, you might have your hands full with this one, but it’s crucial for improving your time management.
Max Ade, CEO of Pickleheads explains, “Try reserving the beginning of the week for your major tasks that require the most attention and need several layers of approval. These will take more time and energy, so getting them done sooner is wise. You can then do the smaller, more passive tasks at the end of the week when you’ve freed up some time.”
If you feel like you already have a strong grasp on prioritizing things in your personal life, use that as a starting point for nailing it in your professional life. It will take some trial and error, but learning how to prioritize your tasks can save you time in the long run; it’s crucial to understand what should be done first.
Create a Weekly Schedule
One of the best and simplest time management tips is planning your weeks. Planning in advance can help you get a visual of your workload for the week and also help you mentally prepare for the work you have coming up. On top of that, it will give you an idea of when you’ll have additional bandwidth for additional tasks.
“Planning your days in advance can do wonders for your mind,” suggests Max Schwartzapfel, CMO of Fighting For You. “Instead of sitting down at your desk on Monday morning wondering how you’re going to tackle everything, you’ll already have an idea of what will happen when.”
The best way to strategically create a schedule is to do it at the end of each week for the beginning of the next week. Planning on a Friday what your upcoming week will look like can save you a lot of headaches and stress every morning. Scheduling your weeks also helps with goal-setting, giving you a sense of what’s ahead and what you want to accomplish in a set amount of time.
Learn How to Say No
A key ingredient to effective time management is the ability to say no. This doesn’t mean arguing with your manager when they ask you to fulfill a task; rather, it means setting boundaries for yourself so you’re not overbooked and overwhelmed.
“We all want to demonstrate teamwork and be open to helping our peers, but we must ensure we don’t fall into the pit of saying yes to everything,” explains Shaunak Amin, CEO and Co-Founder of SwagMagic. “It starts with agreeing to a few tasks that seem rather trivial, but you end up with an entire calendar full of things you don’t have time for. You’ll ultimately end up not giving your full attention to your own work.”
One way to determine if you should say yes or no to something is to examine the schedule you created for yourself. Do you have some free days available? If so, these are times when you could agree to lend a helping hand to a colleague. If your schedule is completely booked and your only downtime is to grab a quick lunch, flex your “no” muscle to protect yourself and your work.
Understand How You’re Spending Your Time
Now that you’ve learned how to prioritize your tasks, schedule your time, and set boundaries, it’s time to examine how you spend your time. Whether you glance at the clock every now and then or use a time-tracking app, seeing where your time is going is crucial to improving your time management.
Derek Flanzraich, Founder and CEO of Ness says, “Using a time tracking app can be incredibly beneficial as it allows you to see an exact breakdown of what you’re doing when. If you see at the end of the day that you’ve spent hours sending emails and scheduling meetings but still have your entire to-do list remaining, it may be time to reevaluate how you’re spending your time.”Tasks like emails and scheduling meetings are necessary, but they’re a small part of the entire machine. Consider hiring an assistant to help you, or commit to only spending one or two hours daily to doing these tasks. Setting limits for yourself will help you stay on track each week.
Set (Honest) Time Limits
Seeing how you spend your time can be a humbling experience, one where you need to step back and reassess your habits. Work with the schedule you’ve created for yourself, and decide how realistic it is. Is one hour enough time to finish that big project, or is two hours more reasonable?
“There’s nothing wrong with being honest with yourself regarding your workflows,” mentions Saad Alam, CEO and Co-Founder of Hone Health. “How realistically we set your time limits significantly affects how much work we actually get done. If we don’t give ourselves enough time, we’ll never accomplish what we set out to do.”
This may sound counterintuitive, as spending less time on one task allows you more time to complete other things, but you’ll eventually return to the same tasks if they’re not done in their entirety the first time around. Setting a fair time limit for yourself will allow you to give yourself the space you need to get your work done efficiently.
Group Similar Tasks
After you’ve set reasonable time limits for yourself, take a step back and look at your most common tasks — there are often themes between them. Try grouping emails, phone calls, and meetings together as administrative tasks and other work as a heads-down time. Doing so will allow you to see how much of each category you have and where it should go on your schedule.
Asker A Ahmed, Director of iProcess Global Research states, “Grouping together tasks with similar themes allow you to fit them into your schedule more effectively. You’ll see everything laid out in front of you and can hold yourself accountable. If you’ve scheduled admin tasks from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., stick to that; don’t allow yourself to answer emails outside of that time, and it creates distraction and deviates from the schedule you’ve set.”
Steer Clear of Multitasking
Now that you know where your time is going and how much of it you need for each task, it’s time to get focused. We can all claim to do multitasking well, but no one genuinely does. The second you toggle between your email and the presentation you’re working on, the quality of your work and your focus diminish.
“Checking your phone in the middle of a meeting or working on two documents simultaneously are both multitasking, and both will not serve you well,” expresses Maegan Griffin, Founder, CEO and nurse practitioner at Skin Pharm. “Try your best to stick to the schedule you’ve created for yourself and avoid doing more than one thing at the same time — this is how you’ll give your absolute best to what’s in front of you.”
Unlearning how to multitask is no easy feat, but it’s crucial to improving your time management.
Doing multiple things at once will only work against your efforts to be more efficient and productive — you’ll reach the end of the day and realize you’ve only done a quarter of all of your tasks.
Get Organized
If you don’t already have a system for organization in place, now is the time to start. Do you have a pile of papers next to your computer? File them. Do you have 30 unread emails? Answer and sort them. Regardless of how much you need to get organized, set aside time each week to ensure you follow through on the system you’ve set for yourself. Brianna Bitton, Co-Founder of O Positiv says, “You could dedicate each Monday of the week to getting yourself organized. If you want to take it a step further, do this on Sunday so that you have less to worry about once the workday begins. No matter what you choose to do, having a clean, organized space, both physically and digitally, will clear up space in your mind to manage your time as efficiently as possible.”
Getting organized also plays into how you hold yourself professionally. Consider how it might look to the outside person if you invite them into your office for a meeting, only for them to be met with a stack of papers in front of their face. Having a clean, organized workspace reflects how you are as a professional.
Manage Your Stress
A list of expert tips about improving professional time management would not be complete without discussing how to manage stress. As our stress levels rise, our ability to see clearly and work effectively declines.
“Stress will always be present at work, but learning how to manage it is crucial to your success,” states Ryan Rottman, Co-Founder and CEO at OSDB. “If you don’t manage it, you’ll constantly be working in a state of pressure, defeating all of the other tactics you’ve set for yourself to improve time management.”
While there’s something to be said for working under pressure, it’s best not to make this the norm. Try jotting down the times you feel the most stressed and identify any triggers that may have caused it. If getting through your inbox causes you the most stress, strategically schedule that so it won’t interfere with your other work.
A Few Final Thoughts
Improving time management looks different for every professional, so finding the tactics that work for you is paramount to your success. From assigning tasks priority levels to learning how to manage your stress levels, each area builds on one another to form an effective strategy.
The team at Asana suggests, “Ultimately, time management is more of a state of mind than anything else. To effectively manage your time, prioritize your work so you know to work on each day. Instead of letting your to-do list dictate your priorities, focus your attention on your intention to really drive impact.”
No matter what your workdays, weeks, or months look like, following these tips will set you on a path to improving your time management. Be gentle with yourself as you find what works for you, and always keep the end goal in mind: to work better, faster, and stronger.
McClatchy newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
