When you’re a part of the working world, the one thing that there never seems to be enough of is time. Your workforce are going to be filling their days with various tasks that you’ve set for them, and it’s vital that they don’t fall behind on their deadlines.
Often, it can be increasingly difficult to effectively manage multiple tasks at once. Your employees may begin to prioritise certain jobs and completely disregard, or lose track of others. Learning the essentials of effective time management is essential for every employee, so here are 10 tips that you can teach them.
Stop multitasking
It isn’t just bad for business; but it’s also killing your brain according to Inc. The article notes that our brains were not built to multitask and that it can actually lower your work quality and efficiency. When we attempt to do multiple things at once, it means that we’re not putting enough time and effort into each individually. The best thing to do is analyse each task and break down how long you should spend on them separately. Then, you can complete them one after the other.
Delegate employees
It can be hard to relinquish control, but you need to trust your staff enough to be able to do a good job under your direction. Delegate tasks that are easily within other workers’ skillsets when you have higher level projects to work on. At the management level, there are other areas of business that your company can better benefit from in upping its bottom line. This will teach your workers that they don’t have to take on absolutely everything individually. Asking for help is a great way to effectively manage your time.
Block out distractions.
Whether it’s people talking on the phone, other employees gossiping or loud music blaring – take yourself away from it or find a way to block it all out. If somebody else is distracting you, then kindly inform them that you need to focus on your work. Alternatively, if your environment is too loud, find a different and calmer place to get your task completed in.
Save the gossiping for your break
It can be all too easy to spend a little too much time engaging in office gossip. But, re-enforce to your employees that this is what they’re breaks are for. Anything that isn’t business related, or isn’t of high importance, shouldn’t be spoken about when there’s actual work to do.
Install time management software
If you want a way to quickly and conveniently manage your employees, then installing time management software for your company could drastically help all of your employees. It can enable you to keep track of attendance by logging staff hours and allow for increased productivity and organisation.
Set deadlines
Deadlines can give you that sense of urgency that you desperately need. Every manager should be setting task deadlines for their employees, but you should also advise them to make their own individual ones too. This will encourage them to complete things early and allow them to figure out how much time they’re logically going to need.
Assign time limits
Assigning time limits is different to setting deadlines as instead of having just one date to complete everything by, you can figure out how much time you need to spend on each individual task – in order to meet the set deadline. For example, if you have 3 different tasks to complete within 2 weeks, you could delegate an entire week for the toughest task, and split the other across the final week.
Do creative work first
If the first stage of a project is something incredibly dull, then your motivation to complete it is going to dramatically decrease. You never want to start off on a low point, as it’s just going to drag it out and make it more difficult to complete. However, if you start off with something creative, it will stimulate your brain and provide much greater encouragement to continue with what remains.
Set a daily routine
When we do something over and over again, it starts to becomes second nature. Schedule what you need to do for the day and make sure you stick to it. By doing this, you’ll learn what you should be doing at what time and when you should move onto something new.
Start a time audit
Time audits will help you understand if you spent too much (or too little) time on a task, so that you can seek out ways to make improvements in the future. This could be done at the end of each week and it would simply involve you going back over how much time you spent on specific tasks. You can then review your data and see where time is being wasted and where more time should be spent.
If you want to teach your workforce these tips, it’s also essential to adapt them yourself. Your employees will model their workstyle after yours, so you’re going to want to be guiding them down the correct path. Time management is important for every business, so don’t let disregarding it stop you from succeeding.
