Top Tips for Better Time Management at Work 

If you’re like the rest of us, you will appreciate every minute of every day – especially since our days seem to be filled with activities and things to do. But unfortunately, it feels as if there aren’t enough hours in the day to finish everything we set out to accomplish. What’s funny is that most of us have high hopes at the beginning of each day – we have an appointment scheduled early in the morning followed by a lunch meeting with our boss, and then there are a few hours after lunch to tackle the emails that have been hounding you for weeks. But one thing leads to another – that morning appointment stretches into lunch, and your lunch meeting with your boss ends with him asking you to take care of something which will only take an hour – and before you know it, you look up, and it’s 5 pm. Where did the time go? If this happens to you a lot, it’s time you took charge with better time management. But how do you even begin? Here are some top tips for better time management at work.

Find out how you spend it

First of all, find out how you spend your time each day. Then, track your daily activities and make an audit of your schedule. Doing this will help you determine what you can accomplish in one day – and identify activities that provide the best returns. It will also help you identify different ‘time suckers’ – tasks that eat away at your time. You will get a better sense of what you should dedicate time to and what you should avoid, and it can even help you decide which time of the day you are most effective and productive.

Come up with a daily sked

Second, come up with a daily schedule – a schedule you’ll have to follow at all costs. Create the day’s to-do list, and learn which tasks to prioritise and which you can leave for another day. When everything is written down, you can rest assured that you won’t forget anything – and your brain will already know what to do even before you step into the office.

Learn to prioritise

Setting your priorities is key to managing your time. Identify the most crucial tasks and focus on them first, as any good virtual assistant recommends. Incidentally, you may want to hire a virtual assistant to take care of repetitive or administrative tasks, so you have more time on your hands. Then, whilst they are busy with the incidentals, you can focus on the most vital tasks without any distractions.

Check your list of to-do’s and organise it according to a task’s importance and not its urgency. Important tasks support your goal’s achievements, whilst urgent tasks support someone else’s achievements – remember that.

Avoid multi-tasking

 Contrary to popular belief, multi-tasking is not good because it drags your attention away from something you must pay attention to. In addition, the quality of your work will suffer if you multi-task. Instead, focus and concentrate on the task in front of you and ignore distractions. Don’t try to multi-task; you will end up decreasing your productivity and losing precious time if you do so.

In the same vein, try not to get too overwhelmed if your list of to-dos is long – stressing about it will not help, so take a deep breath and do it bit by bit and task by task.

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