How many times has your day been disrupted by someone asking you to help them with a “quick question?” You put aside whatever you were working on and agree to help the person because you don’t want to seem rude. By the time you’ve finished helping them, the “quick question” has taken up forty-five minutes of your day, and you’re now behind on your task list. You find yourself asking how you keep ending up in situations like this. Time management is an integral part of completing your tasks while maintaining your sanity, but you might be at a loss about how to do it. This post will outline ten actionable tips to help you improve your time management at work.
Prioritize Your Tasks with the Eisenhower Matrix
In an average day, certain tasks are most important to get accomplished. You can use the Eisenhower Matrix to determine which tasks to prioritize based on their urgency and importance. The matrix breaks down your task list into four quadrants.
- Do: (urgent and important) This quadrant is full of tasks that have imminent deadlines. It also includes high-profile or overdue projects.
- Schedule: (not urgent but important) In this grouping, you will find tasks like strategic planning or process revisions. These are tasks that help with long-term goals, but don’t have strict deadlines.
- Delegate: (important but not urgent) In this quadrant, you will place time-sensitive, but not high-value tasks. For example, team reminders, schedule management, or follow-ups. These are tasks that you can typically automate using AI agents or workflow builder tools.
- Delete: (not urgent and not important): Finally, the last section consists of unessential tasks or ones that aren’t relevant to immediate or long-term goals. For instance, spending time on social media or responding to non-urgent emails.
Use Time Blocking to Structure Your Day
Once you have prioritized your task list, your next step is to structure your day. The Pomodoro technique focuses on creating short time blocks throughout your day. Typically, they last twenty-five minutes and are followed by a five-minute break. During each block, you work on one task so you can make consistent progress. Follow these steps to implement the Pomodoro technique into your schedule.
- Choose a task: Pick one urgent or important task. Or, if you have several related short tasks, you can tackle them together during one block.
- Start the timer: Work for twenty-five minutes without any interruptions. Before starting, you should eliminate as many distractions as possible. For instance, silence any non-urgent notifications or block off time on your calendar.
- Take a break: After your twenty-five-minute timer goes off, stop and take a five-minute break.
- Repeat: This method repeats with four twenty-five-minute sessions with a five-minute break after the first three sessions, and a twenty to thirty-minute break after the last session before beginning again.
Set Daily and Weekly Goals
The Pomodoro technique is only helpful if you know what you are working towards. A big part of time management at work is having daily and weekly goals. You need to start your week with a plan of what you want to get done that week, and a breakdown of what needs to be done each day. Start your day with an organized to-do list using the Eisenhower Matrix, so you can make consistent progress throughout the day. If you don’t know what you need to get done, you will waste time trying to figure it out in the middle of the day.
When you know you have a plan prepared, you will no longer lie awake at night running through what you need to do for the week. Instead, while you sleep, your brain will subconsciously work on your plans, which means you can wake up with ideas for your day.
The best thing to do is to make a list at the end of the day for what you want to accomplish the next day. This way, you’re ready to hit the ground running when you get to work. However, if you don’t have time to do it the day before, do it first thing when you arrive at work. The time it takes to write up a plan for the day is minimal compared to how much time you will waste if you don’t have a plan at all.
Eliminate Distractions (and Identify Time Wasters)
It can be easy to waste part of your day without realizing how much that time adds up. Here are some simple tips to help you eliminate distractions and time wasters.
Handheld Devices
Your cellphone can be a handy device during your workday, but it’s also the source of a lot of wasted time. Here is how you can optimize your phone usage.
- Use voice-to-text features when you are on the move. For instance, make notes or draft emails/text messages while you are moving around.
- Don’t engage in small talk on calls. Stay focused on what needs to be done.
- If there is a task related to the phone call, do it immediately.
- Give yourself a set amount of screen time and don’t exceed it. Ensure you’re monitoring your digital wellness.
- Schedule breaks from your devices. Staring at a screen all day isn’t good for anyone.
Email can quickly become overwhelming. Here are some tips.
- Have a designated time each day to respond to any non-urgent emails. However, if they are piling up to the point of being overwhelming, tend to them before the designated time.
- Turn off email notifications.
- If you have any junk mail, unsubscribe from it so they don’t clutter your inbox.
- Keep your address book organized and up to date.
- Use shortcuts to sort your email.
Unexpected Visitors
Unexpected visitors are one of the easiest ways to lose track of time. Here are some tips to handle it.
- Set aside time in your schedule for face-to-face visits.
- Set a time limit before the conversation begins.
- If someone comes during a non-designated time, politely offer to schedule a meeting during that time.
- Stand up for the meeting rather than sitting down, as this can help keep it brief.
In-Person and Virtual Meetings
Meetings are another example of tasks that can take up way more time than needed. Here are some tips.
- Ensure you know the purpose of the meeting in advance.
- Arrive early.
- Start and end on time.
- Stick to the agenda.
- Don’t schedule a meeting unless it’s truly necessary and has a specific agenda.
- Have someone take notes or use recording software.
Take Regular, Purposeful Breaks
When it comes to using your time wisely, taking breaks might sound counterintuitive. However, breaks are essential to better time management. When you don’t take breaks, research has shown that you have more stress and reach burnout faster. However, regular breaks increase mental well-being, memory, productivity, and decision-making.
When you are at a higher level of stress, it affects you in many ways. It lowers your energy, causes fatigue, and impacts cognition, productivity, and engagement at work. So, taking breaks and working less actually leads to you doing more in less time. According to a Slack survey, people who took breaks reported 62% better work-life balance, and 43% less stress than those who didn’t.
Don’t just tell yourself that you’ll take breaks, because you often won’t. Instead, build them into your schedule. When you complete a task, take a mini break to recharge. This could be grabbing a cup of coffee, taking a walk, or doing meditation, among other things.
Start With the Most Important Task (MIT Method)
Using the Eisenhower Matrix, you can easily identify the most important task for your day. The tricky thing is that the most important task is not always the most urgent task. Another issue you can run into is focusing on urgent, not important tasks, which then causes important but not urgent tasks to become urgent. You need to ensure that you focus on the important tasks over the urgent ones, so that you don’t end up with more urgent, important tasks.
Use a Time Tracking Tool to Stay Accountable
Parkinson’s Law is a phenomenon that states that we tend to use all the time available for a task, even if we’re capable of completing it faster. If you don’t give your task a time limit, it will inevitably take longer. This is because we tend to get distracted, procrastinate, or underestimate how long something will take to finish. For example, you’ve likely been in plenty of meetings that went long because there wasn’t a clear agenda or time limit.
There are easy ways to get around this, however. When you set time limits, follow these criteria.
- Specific: Set a clear time limit, such as 45 minutes, to write a report draft. Do your best to complete it in that time and then move on.
- Realistic: Give yourself a reasonable amount of time to complete the task, but don’t be overly generous.
- Structured: Use breaks or notifications to move to a new task.
- Trackable: Log your time per task to see how long they take on average. You can do this in a written journal or use a time tracking tool.
Learn to Say No and Manage Your Commitments
It’s great that you want to be a helpful coworker, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of your time. Joining a quick call or checking notifications can quickly pull you out of deep work and diminish your productivity. Try these time management strategies to help you stay productive.
- Block off time: When you know you need to get work done, mark it on your calendar that you are unavailable to meet or chat.
- Update your status: If you’re using a program like Slack, sync your status with your calendar, so people can easily see you’re not available.
- Delegate or automate: Certain tasks can be delegated to your team through team channels or project management apps. You can also create automated workflows for routine tasks.
- Assign to AI assistants: AI assistants can do many tasks for you, such as research, summarization, or report analysis.
Batch Similar Tasks Together
Moving from task to task can take up a lot of mental power. You must reset your mind to a different type of task, which takes time. Instead, batch similar tasks together and complete them before moving on to a different type of task. For instance, set aside time to answer emails and make phone calls rather than responding to emails as they come in or making calls throughout the day. If you know you will struggle to ignore these things, turn off your notifications so that you aren’t tempted.
Review and Adjust Your Schedule Weekly
Finally, you must be adaptable. When you make a plan, it might not turn out the way you expect it to. You may have had what you thought was a great plan for the week, but at the end of the week, you realize you didn’t get nearly as much done as you expected. This means that the following week, you need to adjust your schedule to better pace yourself and get tasks completed. If you are tracking your time spent on tasks, you can use that information to build yourself a better schedule.
Time Management Techniques at Work That Actually Work
Methods like the Pomodoro technique and the Getting Things Done technique can help you manage your workflow so that you accomplish your tasks. The Getting Things Done technique is broken down into five steps.
- Determine what has your attention.
- Determine if it is actionable and make a plan.
- Organize your tasks.
- Review your plans frequently.
- Make action decisions.
Different techniques work for different people, so experiment to find what works for you.
Conclusion
Good time management at work is the key to doing your job well. Eliminating distractions, determining the most important and urgent tasks, and blocking out parts of your day to focus on work are all ways to manage your time well. Evaluate these techniques to see which would work best for you and start implementing them today.
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