5 Ways to Effectively Manage Your Time at Work

Time Management
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Managing your time at work can be more difficult than doing the work itself. There are just too many factors that are out of control. You may arrive late due to traffic, your boss may call up a meeting without prior notice, or an emergency task may pop out at any time. With so many distractions and uncertainties, how do you effectively manage your time at work? Here are some tips.

  1. Audit your current time spending

The first step to managing your time effectively at work is to conduct a time audit. Take a few days to a week to track your daily activities. This will help you set the right expectations of the amount of work you can do in a day. It’ll also show you the time taken by various activities and thus, help you focus on the ones that are most important.

Everyone has a time of the day they’re most productive. If you don’t already know yours, this exercise should help. Finally, conducting a time audit will reveal the amount of your time that gets wasted in unproductive activities, conversations, and thoughts.

5 Ways to Effectively Manage Your Time at Work

  1. Make, and stick to, a daily schedule

This tip is crucial in managing your time, but its also well known. Many people make a daily work schedule, or at least think about making one. But they fail to hash out all the details of the plan and hence, fall off it. If you’re making a daily schedule, it’s important that you set a time to make it during the day.

The ideal time would be right before ending work, but if it’s not possible, listing out your day’s activities need to be the first thing you do in the morning. Making a list at night will help you in two ways: you won’t be worried about the next day, and you can start working as soon as you get to the office.

  1. Get your priorities right

Not all the tasks you need to tackle in a day are similar, or equally important. This is why you need to prioritize your tasks. Here’s how you should categorize them.

  • Important and Urgent – These are the tasks that are important and need immediate attention. Complete them right away.
  • Important but not urgent – These tasks are important but don’t demand immediate attention. Such tasks need a long-term development strategy in place. Try to dedicate most of your time to these types of tasks.
  • Urgent but not important – These tasks need to be executed right away but don’t really contribute to your output. They’re basically distractions born out of poor planning. They either need to be minimized, delegated, or removed altogether.
  • Urgent and unimportant – These tasks don’t hold any value and should be eliminated as much as possible.

Once you’ve prioritized your tasks in order of importance, place them in order and try to follow it accordingly.

  1. Practice timeboxing

So you’ve listed your tasks in order, but how will you meet the time restrictions? By assigning each of the tasks a fixed amount of time. A great time management tool is the Pomodoro Technique. It gives you 25-minute chunks of time to work with short and long intervals in between. This way you can maintain intense focus without inducing mental strain and losing motivation while also enjoying your favourite table games at online casinos like VegasMobileCasino during the break.

To combine the Pomodoro Technique with your priority list, you need to do divide your work into 25-minute chunks. Assign each task to a block of time and simply try to follow it. Of course, you’ll need an estimate for the amount of time a task might take. Remember step 1?

  1. Learn to say no

You’ll never truly be the master of your time if you don’t learn to say no. Only you know what tasks you do in how much time, so if you feel the need to decline a request in order to focus on more important tasks, don’t be afraid to do so.

There are times when you just can’t run away from important tasks. In those cases, you need to learn to delegate them. If you have a team working with you, determine the tasks you can pass on.


This content is a joint venture between our publication and our partner. We do not endorse any product or service in the article.

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