Time Management Strategies

Time management is the process of making good use of the time we have to reach our goals or finish the tasks we’ve been given.

“Time management is the process of planning and being aware of how much time you spend on different activities in order to get more done, be more effective, or be more productive.”

Time management skills help you get the work you need to do done in the time you have.

As a project manager, you might be given a different set of tasks each time around. You also need to plan, manage, and keep track of the work your team does.

Some ways to manage your time are:

Make plans for your work.

A study shows that you are already set up for success if you know what you want to do and when you want to do it.

Perez Serrador from the University of Toronto writes in his paper “The Impact of Planning on Project Success” that planning and project success are linked. Serrador found that project success is closely linked to both how well the project is done and how little it costs. This means that good planning can not only make it more likely that the project will be finished successfully, but it can also save money.

Organizing your daily tasks might be as easy as making a list of things you need to do and things you’d like to do. Still, if you are planning for more than one project, making a high-level project plan will help you see the requirements for all of them and set goals and requirements for each one.

Make your goals clear.

A list of things you need to do can be too much to handle at times. Putting your list of things to do into smaller pieces will help you handle it better. Setting clear priorities will help you arrange your tasks based on how important they are, how quickly they need to be done, and how much work they will require.

The Eisenhower Matrix can help you tell the difference between important and urgent tasks on your list. It’s a tool for getting things done that helps you organise your work into four groups:

These are the tasks you need to do right away and right away.

Things that are important but not urgent: things you can plan to do later

Not important but necessary: If you can, you may give these tasks to someone else to do.

You can skip tasks that fall into this category because they are not important or urgent.

The great thing about the Eisenhower Matrix is that you can quickly set priorities for your work by making one on the go with just a pen and paper.

Do one thing at a time.

Multitasking is praised by some, but it seems to do more harm than good. An article on Entrepreneur called “The Dangers of Multitasking” says that doing several things at once is useless and wasteful. If we try to do too many things at once, our brains need time to switch between them. This means that we’re not as productive as we could be during this time.

Spend your time on one thing at a time, finish it, and then move on to the next one. So, the change is smooth, and your brain is ready for a new task, especially if you give yourself at least a few minutes of rest between tasks.

The Pomodoro Technique is one method you could use. There are breaks of 25 minutes between each session, which breaks up the work. Force yourself to focus on a single task. This has been shown to make you more productive. Besides, you won’t get tired and will be able to work for longer.

From an Italian word for tomato, the name came. It was based on a kitchen timer. These days, you can use tools that are made just for this method and will tell you exactly how many 25-minute blocks you should spend working.

Cut down on interruptions as much as possible.

According to PMI, 90% of a project manager’s job is to communicate. However, there are times when you need to focus on a task and avoid interruptions as much as possible. It could be writing a report or working on project documentation.

Let’s say you’re using the Pomodoro Method. You need to get rid of all possible distractions before you use it so that you can concentrate on a task for 25 minutes.

You may need to get rid of interruptions like emails, calls, coworkers, or voice chats. Every once in a while, you might want to check your email, make small talk with other people at work, or chat with your team. On the other hand, it really slows you down.

Instead, you can do this:

Set a time to check your email every day if you’re afraid you’ll miss an important message. Every other time is spent on the tasks that have been given.

Tell your coworkers not to bother you when you’re listening to music. You can also listen to music that helps you focus at the same time (or to some white noise, if you prefer).

Put your phone away and snooze notifications to stop checking it all the time.

Our time away from work is taken up by other things. They will make it easier for you to focus on a task if you reduce their number.

Shorten the time you have to do things.

Ever feel like the more time you have to do something, the more likely it is that you’ll put it off instead of using that time to get it done faster? The first article in the Economist in 1955 talked about this tendency to put work aside. It’s called Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson said, “The work grows to fill the time that is available to finish it.” So, if you have more time than you need to finish a job, you probably won’t get it done any faster.

Setting yourself shorter deadlines is something you can do about that. If you still can’t get yourself to finish a task faster, give your team member a due date to look over your work. This way, you have to do the work to show them results.

Find ways to delegate

No one is alone. There are probably people in your company who have the skills and time to help you with some of the things you find hard to do or don’t have time to do.

As you’ve already seen while working on the Eisenhower Matrix, it’s a good idea to find tasks that you can give to other people so that you can focus on the more important and urgent ones.

Use the resource allocation tool to find team members who are available and have the skills needed for a certain task. For example, in Teamdeck you can quickly sort all of your employees by role and see their schedules and free times in a simple calendar view.

By giving your employees work to do, you may actually show that you value their ideas. Give them the power to make choices, and if you need to, stay back and watch over them. They will have less work to do, and you can help them grow professionally at the same time.

Know when to say no.

It’s important to know how much work you can finish in a certain amount of time so that you can keep your promises. It also keeps you from getting stressed out at work and, eventually, burned out.

It can be scary to tell your supervisor, manager, or even boss “no,” but here are some polite and strong ways to do it:

Give a reason. Talk about what other important things you’re doing right now and how adding new ones will affect them.

Give them a list of priorities: If you already have a lot to do and your boss asks you to add another task, show them your list of priorities. Let them decide if the task they want you to do is more important than other things they need to do.

When people ask you to do something, don’t lie or make up an excuse. Tell them straight out why you can’t do something right now.

Ask if the task can be put off. A lot of the time, the date someone gives you to turn in a task is not the actual due date. You should show them that you’re willing to take on new tasks if they can be put off until later.

You don’t want to be seen as the person who doesn’t want to work, so explaining why you can’t take on more work or negotiating over due dates might help you get fewer new tasks.

Wrap up each day

Writing down daily summaries of your work helps you see what you did well and what you still need to do.

Check off the things you’ve done on your list every day when you get home. Looking at what you’ve already done is a great way to get ready for the next day.

Organization that Learns

Organizational learning is the process of making, keeping, and sharing knowledge within a business. As an organisation gains experience, it gets better over time. From this experience, knowledge can be gained. This knowledge is very broad and can be used to help any organisation. Some examples are finding ways to make production more efficient or building good relationships with investors. People, groups, organisations, and interactions between organisations are the four places where knowledge is made.

Most of the time, a learning curve is used to show how much an organisation has learned. Learning curves show that as a business makes more of a good or service, it gets better at being productive, efficient, reliable, and/or high-quality, but the benefits get smaller over time. People learn at different rates, so learning curves are not all the same. Individual skill levels, technological advances, and changes in the organization’s structures, routines, and ways of working together all affect the rate at which it learns.

Because of the pressures that modern businesses face, learning organisations grow. This helps them stay competitive in the business world.

Pros of Learning Organization

• Keeping up the pace of innovation and staying ahead of the competition.
• Better efficiency.
• To be able to better connect resources to customer needs.
• Getting better results at every level.
• Making the company look better by focusing on people more.
• Getting the organisation to change more quickly.
• Building up the organization’s sense of community.
• Making better decisions for the long term.
• Making it easier to share knowledge.
• Things that make a learning organisation unique

Think about systems

A body of work called “systems thinking” led to the idea of the “learning organisation.” This way of thinking lets people look at businesses as things with boundaries. When learning organisations evaluate their business, they use this way of thinking. They also have information systems that check the performance of the whole organisation as well as its different parts. Systems thinking says that for an organisation to be a learning organisation, all of these traits must be present at the same time. For the organisation to not reach its goal, some of these traits must be present.

Mastery of oneself

The dedication of a person to the process of learning is called personal mastery. A business has an edge over its competitors if its employees can learn new things faster than those of other businesses. People think of learning as more than just getting new information. They see it as becoming more productive by figuring out the best way to use their skills at work. Personal mastery can also show up spiritually as things like being able to focus more clearly, having a clear vision, and being able to see and understand reality objectively. Individual learning is achieved through staff training, development, and ongoing self-improvement. However, someone who is not willing to learn cannot be forced to do so. It is important to create a culture where personal mastery is practised every day because research shows that most learning at work happens by accident and not because of formal training. People have said that a learning organisation is the sum of all the individual learning that takes place. However, there must be ways for individual learning to be used to help the organisation learn. Individual performance, self-efficacy, self-motivation, a sense of responsibility, commitment, patience, and focus on important things are just a few of the good things that can happen when you master yourself. Other good things include work-life balance and well-being.

Thought Models

Mental models are people’s and groups’ assumptions and broad ideas that they hold. People have mental models that show what they can and cannot notice. Mental models may limit what people see because they cause selective observation. These models need to be found and questioned if an organisation wants to become a learning one. Each person has a set of beliefs that they want to follow and a set of beliefs that they actually follow. In the same way, organisations tend to keep certain behaviours, norms, and values alive by using “memories.” It’s important to replace hostile behaviour with an open culture that encourages questioning and trust when making a learning space. In order to do this, the learning organisation needs ways to find and evaluate organisational theories of action.

A shared goal

Creating a shared vision is important for getting staff to learn because it gives them a sense of belonging, which gives them focus and energy for learning. The best visions are made up of the individual visions of employees at all levels of the organisation. This means that traditional structures that put the company vision down from above can make it harder to create a shared vision. Because of this, learning organisations usually have flat, decentralised ways of running their businesses.

Learn together

Team learning is the sum of what each person has learned. When people learn together, they grow faster, and the organisation is better able to solve problems because everyone has better access to knowledge and expertise. Learning organisations are set up in ways that make it easier for teams to learn, like letting people cross boundaries and being open. Members of a team can learn more from each other if they pay attention, don’t talk over each other, show interest, and answer. People no longer have to hide or ignore their disagreements because of progress. By those, they make their understanding better as a whole. When people learn in teams, they are better able to think deeply about complicated issues, come up with new, well-coordinated solutions, and build a network that lets other teams do the same. The team’s main goal is to share both private and public information with the rest of the group and make a space where creativity can thrive. Team learn how to work together. Team learning is the process of changing and improving how well the team can work together to get the results that everyone wants. People need to talk and interact with each other in order to learn as a team, so team members need to learn how to communicate openly and understand each other’s meanings. Learning organisations usually have great knowledge management systems that make it easy to create, acquire, share, and use knowledge within the organisation.

The three ways that people learn in organisations and how they work together

According to Argrys and Schon (1996), there are three levels of learning that can happen in a business:

Single loop learning has only one feedback loop when the strategy is changed because of an unexpected outcome (error correction). For example, when sales are low, marketing managers look into why and change their plans to try to get sales back on track.

Learning that leads to a change in how theory is used is called double loop learning. To make things work better, the values, strategies, and assumptions that guide behaviour are changed. In the above case, managers might rethink the whole sales or marketing process to make sure that there aren’t any more or smaller changes like that.

Deutero learning: learning how to make the system of learning better. These are made up of structural and behavioural parts that determine how people learn. So, deuterolearning is basically “learning how to learn.”

This is related to Senge’s idea of the learning organisation, especially when it comes to making learning better and understanding and changing mental models.

So, for learning to be effective, all three must be present, with the goal of continuously improving the organisation at all levels. But while every business will use single loop learning, double loop and especially deutero learning are much harder to do.