How to manage time to optimize work result

Time management is a skill that is required from the employee to the management level, but most people still face problems when it comes to organizing their time at work. In this article, BEMO will share how to effectively manage time, and point out the causes of wasting your time.

1. Point out the “Thief” of time

The first step in your time management strategy is to determine what is causing the loss. Reasons for wasting time include:

Procrastination:

This is a recognizable habit of many people in work and life. They will delay or stop priority work to do less important tasks. This leads to poor output, or when asked for the status of the job, which is always “on hold”.

The cause of the problem comes from:

• Unprofessional tasks lead to a lack of excitement to complete
• Fear of failure and not being appreciated
• The quest is so vague that I don’t know where to start

Exceeding capacity:

Exceeding capacity here is simply exceeding the strength and time allowed to complete the task. This is also one of the common situations in many employees, they have too many tasks that are not in their expertise and cannot control the completion time.

It can be said that they are perfect personnel but do not know how to refuse which leads to overload, and the output will have poor quality. In particular, that workload even affects their lives when forcing them to spend more personal time to meet the “deadline”.

Respond to emails:

How much time do you spend every day replying to emails from customers, superiors, and colleagues? We guess this action consumes a lot of staff time. When responding to emails, employees must prioritize, read, and frame the response accordingly.

In addition, employees also have to deal with tons of spam, advertising from brands, and have to check every time there is a new mail notification. This distracts employees, affects their work, and sometimes causes errors in the working process.

Wasted from meetings:

Managers are now spending 30-50% of their time in internal meetings, but the results are still not guaranteed. Meetings related to decision-making or daily reporting of work consume a lot of staff time.

Common signs of wasted meetings are:

• Arguing throughout the meeting
• Attendees did not contribute ideas
• The meeting time was longer than planned
• End the meeting without summaries and practical actions
• Lack of assignment of responsibilities after the meeting

Distractions on technology: This problem often occurs in up to 90% of employees today, affecting work performance. Technological devices grab their attention, and when faced with complex tasks, it takes longer to get started.

2. How to manage time effectively?

There are many ways to manage your time effectively, along with coordinating your ability to organize your work. Some useful time management techniques include:

2.1 Build work schedule

Working with a plan will help you a lot and create an optimal time budget. Set your priorities first, put less important tasks later, and divide your calendar by day, week, or month. To make it easy, you can create a task breakdown table with 2 columns of priority and importance and specific completion time.

For example, creative work should be done in the morning with a time of 3 hours, instead of arranged in the afternoon, because after noon the brain is not as active as in the morning.

2.2 Things to do during the day

This is a way for you to complete your daily workload without worrying about being late. It’s very simple, you just need to list the day’s tasks, along with the start time. Note that you should sort by the importance of each task.

When you have a detailed to-do list for the day, you will be able to get it done quickly and efficiently. But to go the long way with this method, you have to take it seriously every day, adapt, and over time you will manage your time more effectively.

2.3 Set specific goals

Your work will run more smoothly if you have specific goals, and you will have a more effective way to solve your work to avoid wasting time. The SMART model is very useful to help you set your goals:

• S (Specific) – Set specific goals from the beginning
• M (Measurable) – Outputs can be measured
• A (Attainable) – The goals set are achievable based on available resources
• R (Relevant) – The goal must be related to your career
• T (Time-bound) – Break down the goal and determine the specific execution time

The above are effective time management methods that you should consider to optimize and improve work performance. But before applying the above methods, you must practice and learn to avoid the elements that “steal” time, determined to build a scientific work plan.