Are you someone who always feels like there aren’t enough hours in the workday? Do you find that when the end of the day rolls around you haven’t accomplished anything you set out to? Some of these feelings may be due to poor time management. Whether you’ve been working for one year or 20, every professional needs to make the most of their day. Here are some ways to master time management.
Find Time Wasters
There are times throughout the day when we take a quick break. Maybe it’s five minutes to check personal email, or a quick run to the coffee shop. An occasional breather is not a bad thing. But when the breaks become 30 minutes instead of 10, they’ve morphed into time wasters.
To identify the time wasters, review your work habits, and note where you might be wasting time each day. Once you’ve discovered what your time wasters are, think about ways that you can decrease or remove them from your day. For example, if you typically spend 30 minutes each morning chatting with colleagues, start by cutting that time in half. If you find yourself spending hours online, consider using anti-distraction programs which can block access to websites for specified periods of time. Be honest with yourself about what is taking up your time, and then work to rectify them.
Schedule Your Time Appropriately
Often we’re pulled into meeting after meeting, and there is little time left to actually get work done. Instead of allowing your calendar to get swallowed up by meetings, block chunks of time specifically so you can focus on work. This allows you to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed and bogged down in meetings, and gives you dedicated time to get work done. By providing yourself with dedicated working time, you can reduce your stress and find it easier to focus on the task at hand.
Consider Tracking Your Time
By hand or with the help of an app, there are plenty of ways to track your time. Tracking how you spend your working time over the course of one or multiple weeks will help you find patterns in not only how you work, but also where you may be able to work more efficiently. You’ll see how much you can reasonably get done each day and how much time you typically spend on each task. From there, you may be able to adjust your work schedule to better manage your time.
Communicate
A large part of time management includes effective communication. You need to be able to say no to meetings when you have a deadline, or let colleagues know why you are unable to offer additional support on their projects. Communicating your own needs and tasks helps others to see that you have a significant workload of your own. Being able to let others know when you are swamped allows colleagues to potentially offer help when you need it, which, in turn can help the team complete projects more quickly, making more time for future work.
Go Easy on Yourself
Good time management skills don’t develop overnight. They can take weeks, months, or even years to learn. Give yourself the grace to understand that this is a process. Small wins are just as important as big ones, and every step you take toward better time management is a step in the right direction. You may find that changing your routine is harder than you thought. Don’t get discouraged if you find yourself reverting to old habits. Instead, acknowledge them, correct them, and keep going.
Mastering time management takes hard work and determination. There are a number of different ways to go about it, and you may need to test out a few before landing on one that works for you. If you commit to making a change, you will — and that change will help you feel more productive and less stressed.
On Topic
Dr. Corwin King is an adjunct professor in the master of arts in Medical Science Program at the Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences in Yakima, Wash. He is an enrolled member of the Samish Indian Nation in Washington, vice president of his tribe’s economic development board, a scholarship reviewer for AISES, and a Sequoyah Fellow. He lives in Ellensburg, Wash.
How can a professional maximize their workday?
To get the most out of a workday, I’d suggest three things that a professional can do:
First, prioritize your tasks. If you have three things to do today, decide which one is the most urgent and do it first. Unless it’s an emergency, resist the urge to start with the latest task to hit your desk. You can spend a lot of time doing minor things that way, while major things don’t get done because you’re out of time.
Second, work on one task at a time. Avoid starting a task and interrupting it to do something else. It’s easy to work a bit on one thing and a bit on another, but at the end of the day you’ll realize you haven’t finished anything. As a clue, if you can’t remember what you accomplished today, you probably spent most of your time just spinning your wheels.
Third, separate work from play. If we’re honest, many of us have to admit that we don’t spend all our time at work actually working. We visit with our colleagues; we use our computers to surf the net, answer personal email, play video games, and more. It can be tough — especially if you work from home — but set clear times for work and for play. Mixing the two together often means that we don’t do a very good job at either of them.
As the old saying goes, everyone’s day has the same amount of time. The reason some people get more done with their day is that they use their time better. They set goals and try to stick to them. They focus on one task at a time and resist interruptions. They work when they work and play when they play. They know that if they don’t manage their time, it will likely manage them.
