During the holiday season, I have noticed that I am always looking for ways to be more efficient with my time. Due to the fact that I travel often, I want to definitely make sure that I am aware of my time and make the best use of my time daily because as we know, our days turn in weeks, which turn into months, then into years. Furthermore, you can look up and a year, 5 years, 10 years or more have just past you by, and none of us want that. I strive to be present in each moment and enjoy it for what it is, and I hope you do the same. However, I can always use help in being more effective and efficient with my time. I came across this article with 7 tips on Better Time Management. The list is below for your review.
1. Find your Primetime: Everyone has an environment in which they get their best work done. Some people get to work hours before everyone else in order to tackle their projects with a clear mind and silent office. Others like to stay late and work after the buzz of the day has died down. Flexible work schedules are a godsend for employees who get their best work done at odd hours, but if your job doesn’t afford you that flexibility, figure out how to replicate those moments in smaller ways.
2. Share Your Calendar at Work: To protect yourself as an employee and just feel good about your productivity, try sharing your calendar with your manager and team. This isn’t always fun for people who don’t like to feel like someone is always looking over their shoulders. However, the best way to have your time respected is to be transparent, within reason, about how you are spending it.
3. Share Your Calendar with Friends: It might seem strange but I also share my calendar with friends outside of work. When friends gave me that window into their schedules, I could see right away when they were too busy with work to hang out, rather than asking them a million times if they were free. In the same vein, we also saw when our free nights lined up and could actually schedule fun time more easily. Time management isn’t just about thriving at work but feeling at ease when you’re off the clock. Getting better in both spheres led to my social life improving and my work life feeling less stressful. I was able to decompress and enjoy my time with friends rather than feeling guilty about how I was spending my time.
4. Know Your Priorities: Working professionals need to understand what is expected of them and when, as well as how, to articulate their priorities to others. If you have regular meetings with a supervisor, don’t just ask them what you need to do; ask for clear timeframes that might include check-ins, progress reports, final deadlines, and an understanding of the most and least important tasks. Some of these can be flexible: If you remind them of all the other things on your plate, those dates may change. You simply want some time framework in which to operate.
5. Get Clear on Fixed vs. Unfixed Commitments: An ideal schedule would be roughly 50/50: Not so fixed with meetings and appointments that you have little room for error and even less in which to complete your work. And not so unfixed that it seems like anything goes...until it doesn’t.
6. Regularly Reassess Your Schedule: How you spend your time can change based on your personal life, the season, even the weather. Organizational changes, year-end holidays, vacation and sick leave, and new company objectives can also have a huge impact on how you manage your time at work. It’s important to understand that many of these changes are hard to predict and impossible to control — but you can control your response to these pressures.
7. Follow Through: The most important step in effective time management in the workplace is following through! Project management systems, calendar apps, and scheduling software aren’t replacements for devising a strategy. Outlook, Google Calendar, planners, and notebooks aren’t useful if you don’t actually incorporate those aids into a larger system. Accept that there may be systems you must use to stay in sync with your team, think about the tools you can remove from your load that only gum up the works, and then get going. Effective time management involves both creating a process and then acting on it. Personal accountability to your schedule is the final step.
