With the fast pace and ever connected nature of society today – it can feel like there is never enough time in the day.
Time management has become more important in recent years as work has become more autonomous, particularly for those working from home. Managing and planning your day and work tasks can help to increase productivity, there can be an overwhelming number of tools, apps and strategies that make it hard to know where to start.
Recent research has found that time management is really important in life satisfaction and helps to provide people with a feeling of self-accomplishment.
Here is a list of some options to try, the best way is to find something that works for you and your working style, sometimes this takes some trial and error so don’t give up if you don’t find success straight away.
- Structure your time:
- Planning your calendar for the next day can be really helpful in creating daily routines. Try using a diary, outlook calendar or calendar on your phone to schedule blocks of time where you may have meetings and designated free time to do independent work. A good tip is scheduling in ‘uninterrupted’ time where you can focus solely on the tasks at hand – this could be an hour of listing yourself as ‘Do Not Disturb’ and replying to all of your emails.
- Prioritise tasks:
- Similar to above this involves actually having a priority system for tasks to get done. You can use a strategy of: need to finish Today/ Tomorrow/ By the end of the week or use the ABCD analysis which ranks tasks on the basis of urgency and importance.
- Adapting your schedule and being creative with your time:
- This is about being conscious of your personal work style and noticing if there are times you can use effectively for higher productivity. For example, if you are a morning person – you might find you are most productive between 8-9am so you might make this your ‘uninterrupted’ time to work on the more complex tasks of your day. Further if you have a long commute into the office – you may use this time to catch up on some study or reading, or even use this time effectively to plan your day.
- Use productivity or timing apps: There is a multitude of extremely useful apps and programs available that can help you to schedule your time and also stay on track: here is a few to try:
- Monday.com – a great online collaboration and management app that helps to organise and keep track of tasks. A great feature of Monday is the ability to collaborate with your team and keep track of the workflow which allow for great cohesive task management.
- TODOIST – a powerful planning app that allows you to plan and schedule to do list, tag and separate different projects and also share tasks with your team.
- Trello – think of it as a digital bulletin board that you can use to set up to do lists, tasks, notes etc. Everything can be shared with other users, with provisions for creating new cards, adding comments, and assigning tasks.
- Rescue Time – an app that will run in the background to track the time you spend completing different tasks, it is then possible to view your activity collated in the app and allows you to set targets and alerts to help you develop better working habits and best prioritise your time!
This is the another article in our new WWNSW Wellbeing Series – we are aiming to share articles, resources and tips weekly with advice from our EAP program to manage stress and promote wellbeing in and out of the workplace.
References:
https://www.techradar.com/au/best/best-productivity-apps
https://eapassist.com.au/eap-assist/time-management-skills/
