Time management skills play an extremely important role for everyone in any profession or job. Smart time management will help increase work efficiency, reduce pressure and bring relaxing moments outside of work for employees. So how can we manage and organize our time effectively?
The following 5 time management methods will bring optimal work efficiency to office workers.
Key Elements of the Time Management Process
There are 6 factors related to Time Management including:
- Activity definition: Each individual should identify and schedule the various activities and tasks performed within his or her job duties. This is necessary to complete work on time.
- Sequence of operations: In this step, administrators need to produce documents and build a map of each individual’s tasks in it. These tasks must be sequenced to complete resource allocation.
- Estimate resources: Determine the resources including people, tools, and machinery needed to complete the job.
- Estimate activity duration: Estimate progress using formulas such as PERT (Program Review Review Technique) to develop accurate schedules to complete lengthy tasks.
- Develop work schedule: Plan start and end dates for each activity as well as analyze the order of activities, progress, resources and barriers in the schedule to have an accurate plan.
- Schedule control: The intervention of an arising task must be managed to always ensure that the work progress is not disturbed.
Why is time management important at work?
Surely everyone has felt like they were wasting their time by wasting hours just doing meaningless and ineffective things.
The reality is that there are many “time wasters” in our daily lives. This explains why time management is important in work management. Any work you are doing or about to start needs to have a start and end date.
In all professions and fields, time really is as important as money. If you still don’t know effective time management techniques, the content below will list the best time management methods.
The most effective time management methods
1. Use tools and software
One of the ways to quickly and effectively manage time for office workers is to use appropriate tools, software and equipment. Currently, there are many tools to help handle work and manage projects to meet the needs of each work field.
Each individual will use tools to manage their time and tasks well. Specifically, you can consider some of the following tools:
ProofHub is a flexible way to manage time based on built-in time tracking software. This software contains data related to the work that managers need to perform in a certain time.
Team members will clearly understand the “start” and “due” times to perform tasks scientifically and sequentially. Thanks to work management software, teams can better manage work and schedule project completion time.
FastWork Workplace
FastWork Workplace is considered the optimal time management method for employees and leaders at companies and businesses. This software offers many advantages in managing, organizing and tracking work progress.
The software helps managers control the entire work from overview to detail. This helps optimize work processing time and increase work efficiency. This online management software is applied to both web and mobile platforms, extremely convenient for users.
Hubstaff is one of the commonly used time management, providing project time management features. This software helps track work in the form of activity reports.
Hubstaff can be formatted in calendar mode to track daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly time entries, etc. Thanks to this software, managers can analyze their team’s performance.
ClickTime
ClickTime is a time and budget management method for projects that is updated realistically through data. From this software managers can predict project needs by tracking the time the team is spending.
However, ClickTime is quite difficult to use due to its complexity and inconsistency.
RPA CLOUD
The software helps you create an assistant (bot) that helps you perform repetitive daily tasks. There is also the ability to schedule and automatically execute when the appointment time comes. This definitely saves you a lot of time at the office. Bots can operate 24/7 non-stop so you can rest assured to do other things.
RPA CLOUD is an automation for chrome so you can try it today.
2. Know how to allocate time
Managers and employees need to keep a diary of their working time to see if they are using their time appropriately. Time is considered human’s most valuable asset, and cannot be recovered.
The habit of recording your daily work diary is an effective time management method for you. The benefits of time management for employees are enormous. Every day you should take time to list the tasks that take up the most of your time. This will help employees and managers better divide their time for important tasks.
You need to determine whether the tasks that consume the most time during the day are the most important tasks or not. Or ask the question why some people complete the same job and the number of hours they work, while others don’t. Employees and managers also need to arrange to spend the most time on the most important work and tasks of the day, followed by other work or entertainment needs.
3. Arrange work priorities
One of the ways to manage time that every office worker cannot ignore is to prioritize tasks that need to be completed first during the day. You should start a new working day by making a list of tasks that need to be completed first, important tasks and tasks that need to be prioritized. This will help determine what work you need to do first, and what tasks you need to spend a lot of time completing.
Specifically, employees can divide work into categories such as: Important and urgent that need to be done first and immediately. In there:
- Important but not urgent work performed during normal work hours of the day
- Urgent but not important, this task can be delegated to someone else if possible
- Not urgent and not important, done after completing the above tasks.
By making a list of priority tasks for the day, employees can easily control their time and work performance. In addition, you can prioritize the tasks that need to be done on the project management tool.
Managers need to arrange items in order of priority according to the importance and urgency of the project. This time management method helps limit missed deadlines as well as delays in work.
4. Compile a job list
One of the effective ways to manage time for office workers is to make a comprehensive to-do list. Project managers need to make a comprehensive list of each team member’s tasks for easier management and tracking. Synthesizing and organizing work will make management and control easier and more effective.
Managers can apply ways to organize task lists such as:
Organize tasks by due date
Organizing work by due date is an effective time management method for office workers. Managers as well as employees need to make a list of tasks that need to be completed according to the deadline set from the beginning. This will help the workload be handled better, avoiding overdue deadlines and deadline delays. Effective time management software helps managers and work teams have more motivation to complete work when deadlines are approaching.
Project managers simply note the start and due date on each task in the list and arrange them in due date order. This list will help employees determine what needs to be done first and what needs to be done later during the day, week, and month.
Organize work according to schedule (with Kanban)
Kanban is understood as an information board or Kanban management method originating from the Toyota car manufacturing company. This is considered one of the extremely effective ways to manage time. Kanban brings many advantages to managers and businesses through the scientific arrangement of target tasks.
Through this method, tasks will be arranged according to specific times, helping to ensure on schedule. Managers only need to record the workflow by visualizing each service.
5. Avoid making commitments beyond your means
Time management brings many benefits to businesses. Most managers and team members spend a lot of time worrying about whether their team can complete a project on time.
Committing to completing a limited amount or level of work can cause direct pressure on employees. This is also one of the reasons why projects fail.
In this case, managers need to improve their time management skills by moving from one project to another, avoiding wasting time and personnel. In addition, managers can also use the 80/20 or Pareto principle to manage time effectively. This principle helps optimize working time during the day by prioritizing each task.
Scientific and intelligent time management methods not only help increase work efficiency but also bring psychological comfort and relaxation to employees and managers. By arranging an effective schedule, work is completed on schedule, increasing opportunities for personal development and future advancement.
