Time Management: Tips for Boosting Work Productivity
What key time management tips do we need to follow when aiming at polishing time management skills for a guaranteed boost of work productivity?
Time management tips at workplace are always handy because, essentially, time management revolves around our day-to-day lifecycle. Be it home or office, we take the baggage of this affirmative term along with us.
We acquire time management skills from students' years when we balance study and life to have time for sports and socializing. According to research, the polished time management skills makes a positive impact on academic success.
Similar is the case when you are running a business: it takes a huge effort and massive amount of money to bring it to the market.
Easy-to-follow time management tip for employees prove to be helpful in keeping business continuously thriving, especially when it comes to:
- achieving the goals
- scaling the operations
- expanding the area of your business expertise.
A systematic timetable helps in predicting greater outcomes. Spending merely 10-12 minutes on planning a day can save up to 2 hours that otherwise would have gone to waste.
What Is Time Management?
Simply speaking, time management is the process of planning how to divide your time for assigned tasks and complete them successfully and within the set deadlines. Time management is the foundation for improving business productivity.
Good time management empowers you to run your business operations with efficiency so that you get more done in less time. As per statistics, 70% of people use a to-do list to work more productively in an organized manner.
Hence, time management strategy includes planning out your available time in order to work more effectively. Why does ignoring time management have dire consequences?
With poor time management, you may end up with:
- low quality work
- increasing stress levels
- missing deadlines
- falling into procrastination trap
- ruining your work-life balance.
To avoid it, the focus should be shifted to the advantages of cultivating time management habits.
Time Management Tips and Strategies
Time Management Planning
Time is closely linked to goals and plans. Setting time estimates properly implies that businesses can count on delivering work on time, which in its turn, leads to smooth functioning of workflow.
What are the key indicators you are doing it right? 🔠🔔
- You have a daily checklist
- Your tasks are structured on a priority basis
What you have🌟🎯🌟: Time management eliminates all the chaos that slows down the working of an organization and shows how long it takes to achieve certain goals.
Time Management For Employee Performance Enhancement
Time management enhances employee performance by helping them filter prioritized tasks. This assures employees that they have enough time available to complete every assigned task.
What are the key indicators you are doing it right?🔔🔠
- Employees fully utilize task management capacities by filtering tasks
- They have realistic time estimates, which lets team members navigate along workflow with confidence.
What you have🌟🎯🌟: Time management benefits as the quality of your work increases when you're not rushing or rushed to complete it.
Organized workflow
Time management enables businesses to promote an organized working environment. With proper time management, the chance of chaos, mismanagement or delay in completion of tasks is minimized.
What are the key indicators you are doing it right?🔔🔠
- The teams have little to no difficulty in meeting deadlines
- The turnover is minimal
- Employees' duties and obligations are clearly stated, which means they need no micromanagement and can work autonomously.
What you have🌟🎯🌟: The business operates on smooth workflows that allow to deliver the expected business outcomes hassle-free.
Structured work time
More than often, mental stress associates with work and it doesn't matter what kind of work you are doing. However, you can eliminate stress with the help of a structured work time.
What are the key indicators you are doing it right? 🔔🔠
- Your employees have a timetable that prioritizes mental health
- The policies about overwork are clearly stated
- Employees are encouraged to plan and take PTO.
What you have🌟🎯🌟: Time management creates an organized environment that improves employees' productivity while reducing their stress. When the tasks get completed on time it encourages employees to get rid of stress and anxiety.
Improving Businesses' Productivity
Time management improves businesses' productivity by making them highly efficient.
What are the key indicators you are doing it right? 🔔🔠
- Time allocation and time utilization are aligned
- Work review is performed with the consideration of time tracking data analysis
- Feedback on performance is given in a constructive way.
What you have🌟🎯🌟: Time management increases productivity while eliminating time management loops. It improves staff focus and assists in accomplishing more with less time.
Use Time Management Tools To Get Benefits
By understanding the true essence of time management and applying time tracking solutions, entrepreneurs can achieve greater business outcomes.
The benefits of time tracking for better time management are immense. As it was shown above, accessing the work time metrics can be of great help in managing time which means that businesses will be able to:
- promote an organized working atmosphere
- reduce stress of meeting deadlines
- keep timeframes set and unblurred (differentiating work, overwork, and vacation time clearly)
- enable employees to balance work and life.
6 Golden Time Management Strategies To Follow
To utilize all the mentioned benefits and improve time management at your workplace, you need to follow basic rules that work for all types of industries.
1) Filter Prioritized Tasks
Outlining prioritized tasks improves employees working capacity as it becomes easy to accomplish tasks. A to-do list always works helpful in disposing of tasks quickly without leaving employees stressed.
Prioritizing tasks signifies you know the tactics of working efficiently. It also indicates the optimal ways of completing tasks.
More on types of priorities and building them in workflow is here.
2) Eliminate Distraction
Distractions are the major causes of low business productivity. When distractions occur frequently, the working capacity of every employee goes down.
Smartphones, social media, and talkative coworkers majorly contribute to distracting you from your priorities to accomplish on time. For a start, keeping phones in silent mode is the wisest way to meet your goals.
You can read how to create a distraction-free environment here.
3) Apply Time Management Tools
Whatever business domain is in focus, tech savviness will work for it. In the fast paced world, embracing technology simplifies your work processes and empowers you to work with greater efficiency.
For instance, if we talk about salon and spa industry, we can see that booking software integrated in a work time tracker shows to be an invaluable for simplification of salon operations and a boost in client engagement.
Besides, it saves your front desk staff time as it usually offers all the features for hassle-free scheduling, point-of-sales for quick transactions and much more.
4) Show Gratitude To Employees
By showing appreciation and rewarding employees for their outstanding work employers build healthy work environment and set time management as a value in the corporate culture.
The employees who work with dedication and achieve goals on time should be rewarded and promoted on the ongoing basis. It gives a huge boost to their motivation and helps keep a focus on time management to accomplish their day-to-day tasks.
5) Plan your work systematically
It is always advised to prepare a rough plan in your mind or in physical form as it gives an idea to work productively.
A plan is a must before heading towards any objective. The plan creates a roadmap directing you to meet goals in the right manner. When you organize your work systematically you become capable of working more efficiently.
6) Don’t Multitask
If you think multitasking is the smart way of time management, it's wrong perception. Though you may end up completing several tasks on one go, you can't neglect the fact that it might cost quality and mental health.
Multitasking in work causes distractions and, in the long run, slows down the processes. When businesses aim to accomplish multiple tasks without regarding interdependency, they get deviated from the path of making productive and consistent outcomes.
Wrapping it up
When speaking of business productivity, a focus on effective time management is a must to take your business up.
With tips for better time management, you allow your business to accomplish bigger results in a shorter period of time. Most importantly, it helps you focus better and enables you to be more productive by lowering the stress level.
When you manage your work systematically you can easily balance your personal and professional life. The advantages of time management are not restricted to your workplace only and extend far beyond work. The best part is releasing time that you can spend with people that matter most to you.
Author Bio
Naina Roy has been in Business Analytics Department at Salonist since 2017. Her passion is helping people in business management through the expert industry coverage that she successfully provides.