Time Management: 8 Tips on How to
Boost Your Productivity
1. Keep the work environment
organized
The organization is the first step to good time management.
You don't have to be the most organized person in the world, but you need to be
enough not to waste time “in the middle of your mess”. Try to create an
organization logic. For more
information, you can check at Zoetalentsolutions.com
Try to think: How
many times have you been looking for a file on your computer and couldn't
remember how you named it?
It's this kind of
error that makes you waste time and have to redo jobs! So, stop to think about
the best organization for you, it can be writing down everything in a notebook,
in a digital list, creating rules and standards for your folders, files, and
documents. The decision is yours, but it is important to follow one rule.
2. List your tasks and activities
Once you have organized the macro, you should go to the
micro, identifying all your activities, routine or not.
With activities listed, you should organize them by priority
and importance, set up a daily or weekly task routine or task flow, and most
importantly, try to keep them running.
3. Differentiate what's urgent from
what's important
Organizing tasks by differentiating them between important
and urgent is widely used and effective worldwide.
Important: These are tasks that require
planning and more time for execution, which should be thought in advance.
Urgent: Something that requires immediate
attention, motivated by deadlines.
From this definition, Covey developed the urgent-important
matrix to improve the organization of tasks.
Thus, we realize that there are 4 types of tasks:
Important and Urgent: They are considered “crises,”
something that can affect the entire company, has a big impact and needs to be
resolved immediately.
Important and not urgent: These are tasks that require
attention because they have great relevance to the company, such as goals and
planning, but can be developed with more time, usually longer.
Not Important and Urgent:
Usually tasks that have been procrastinated or overdue are the results
of a lack of organization from you or the team, and maybe external
interruptions for you to solve.
Not Important and Not Urgent: These are the tasks that you should
avoid or not pay as much attention as they are not important or urgent.
Whenever a new task comes up, make an assessment of where it
fits in, and then define how you will handle it.
4. Try to keep a routine
A routine helps you keep tasks performing on schedule. It is
important to set aside the time needed for routine activities, so you are not
late and do not forget any important activity.
Have a schedule of activities for the week and day so you
can get organized whenever demand arises.
5. Perform one task at a time
When you try to do everything at once you end up not farming
anything. It is important to organize your activities and perform them one by
one from start to finish without interruption to do other activities.
Why do that? When you start an activity, it takes you a
while to get into the rhythm, focus on what needs to be done and how you will
finish it. With interruptions you will lose focus and have to redo this process
over and over again, wasting time and taking much longer to perform the same
activity.
6. Use organization tools
As time management is very relevant in the organizational
world, several tools were created with the focus of optimizing this process in
companies and teams. Scheduling tools, task organization, task time
measurement, and team productivity are all offered in the market and can
provide you with many benefits.
For example, by using an online timesheet to track project
hours, you not only automate this process but also get detailed information
about your productivity.
The advantages of using time management tools and apps are
usually:
●
Process Automation
●
Organization and centralization of activities
●
Reduction of complicated and bureaucratic processes
●
Access to more result indicators
● Systems and Team Integration
7. Create metrics for your
management.
Metrics are very important to any business or professional,
after all, how do you rate something without any indicators? The era of
evaluation based on feeling and “schisms” is over, now organizations are much
more data-driven.
Therefore, it is important to define personal and professional performance metrics. Start by setting your goals, a
period of action, and measurement.
For example, you want to know how your report production is
doing. For this, it defines that this is an interesting indicator measured by
month, so it will analyze the production for a whole month. Create a file to
annotate every time you produce a report and by the end of the first month, you
will have your monthly indicator. Do the same process the following month and
beyond, so you'll get an average of the number of reports you can produce each
month, and you can compare these values with each other and identify times that
you were most productive or unproductive.
Easy right? Now just assemble the indicators you would like
to evaluate and get started!
8. Always Optimize Your Process
Once you have started doing good time management, you cannot
stop. Keep pace and always focus on streamlining your process, use performance
metrics and score points for improvement!
Get information on better ways of organizing and managing
time, such as updating and releasing new software that can help you in this
process.
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