Time Management at Work: Unlocking Your Productivity Potential
Mastering time management will make you more productive and will boost the quality of your work, but it has other benefits as well. Using your time well can also lift your overall sense of wellbeing beyond your job. Conversely, a demanding job that is too hectic spikes stress and can adversely impact all aspects of your life.
Time is really your most vital asset; your most limited resource. These actions can help protect it.
Understand Your Relationship With Time
Understand your time by honestly assessing how you spend it: In meetings, working alone, on coffee breaks, or a walk outside. Audit your time by diligently logging each day’s activities for a full week. This will reveal:
- Your Benchmarks: Logging how much you accomplish in one full week gives you a better sense of what you can reasonably accomplish in one single day. Without this baseline understanding of your potential daily productivity/output, you run the risk of feeling frustrated by your output even on productive days.
- Your Deficits: Identify “calendar deficits,” those meetings or tasks that are not critical that you could perhaps drop. Knowing what commitments do not advance your goals allows you to gradually eliminate them to maximize your time.
- Your Most Productive Times: Your audit will reveal which activities offer the greatest returns and also your most productive times for focused work. Maybe you are most productive from 10 a.m. to noon (or 8 a.m. to 11 a.m., or perhaps after 5 p.m.). Maybe you’re a night owl! Knowing your best times, schedule accordingly.
An audit of your time is worth it. It is the first step toward avoiding the substantial costs of a poorly organized work and personal week—decreased quality of work, increased stress (for you, fellow team members, and family), and diminished overall happiness.
Use Strategies for Effective Time Management
Having committed to optimizing your time to accomplish your goals and priorities, these three proven strategies can help you manage your time more effectively at work.
1. Prioritization
In the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the keys to success is Put First Things First®. Prioritize tasks to achieve your most important goals first instead of constantly reacting to the next urgent task. The goal is to be able to work on things that are really important before they become urgent, mindful of not falling into a pattern of thinking that everything is important and urgent. Consider the various “emergencies” that demand your full attention and separate the real emergencies from unnecessary tasks that can be avoided. You will always face urgent tasks, but you will never achieve your goals if you don’t effectively prioritize.
2. Narrow Your Focus
Multitasking may feel more efficient, but an American Psychological Association study finds it actually lowers productivity as your brain bounces between disparate tasks, resulting in “switching costs.” Improving productivity requires that we prioritize quality over quantity. It’s impossible for most people to produce quality work when toiling on two tasks simultaneously. Doing something well without mistakes requires focus.
3. Time Blocking
Identify your highest-value tasks and avoid distractions and multitasking by blocking out enough time in your calendar daily to get your work done. You could start by blocking out about 65% of your day for priority, focused work. If you pack your schedule to 100% you will get totally frustrated by the real world—workplace interactions, meetings, interruptions, and the occasional crisis that might arise. Planning 65% allows you the breathing space—one-third of the day—to get urgent things done, in the midst of getting your most important things done (rather than the other way around). Another key benefit of time-blocking (drawing on the findings of your time audit) is that it allows you to plan on doing your most important work during the hours when you’re most capable of the focus required.
Embrace (the right) Technology
At its best, technology, when used intentionally, can be an effective way to manage time and information. At its worst, it can be a source of endless interruptions and distractions. Generative artificial intelligence can help produce such things as preliminary research and first drafts of memos but isn’t as effective when we are also being barraged by texts, emails, calendar requests, news alerts, etc. Focused work demands freeing yourself of distractions, starting with turning off desktop email, text, and instant message notifications and silencing or storing your personal phone.
Turning off your notifications can be relatively easy if you work in a high-trust environment. For example, team members at FranklinCovey often make their calendars public so that co-workers can see why they might not be responding immediately to incoming messages. Tell colleagues you are intentionally spending specific time blocks on critical tasks. Start small when setting boundaries and learn to say “no” when appropriate instead of taking on every task.
Embrace Your Humanity
In this technology-fueled age, don’t forget that you are human and an integral part of effective time management is taking care of your body so it can support your mind and creative spirit. Numerous studies have shown the importance of taking breaks, getting enough sleep, staying hydrated, etc. Time management works best when your whole self is taken care of alongside the professional tasks we want to accomplish.
Breaks for the self-care you need (whether that’s taking a few minutes to read about last night’s ballgame, playing a game of Wordle on your phone to clear your head between tasks, or texting with friends and family) are important enough to be time blocked in your calendar. But watch out. Taking breaks has a great return on investment, until it is in excess. Are you “wordling” so long that you are not getting the next project started? Or so long you are missing getting ready for dinner with the kids? Stay aware of how much relaxation is good to recharge you to be a better self, and where it tips over into procrastination or distraction.
The Most Trusted Leadership Company
Learn how your organization can use our people, content, and technology to create collective action and meaningful change.
Time Management for Team Success
Effective time management has cascading effects on the productivity, well-being, and overall mood of an entire team. It is especially effective when a leader clearly communicates companywide that their focus is now on high-priority activities. As always, actions speak much louder than words. Yet explaining why these activities were chosen as a high priority can be instructive as well. Knowing the “why” behind the “what” is a great time and stress saver, as actions can be put into context.
Leaders should work to extend trust to team members and delegate, as appropriate to the individual’s talents and abilities, maximizing overall effectiveness and team output. Effective delegation requires assigning the right people to the right tasks and communicating about expectations and deadlines. Clear communication will ensure staff feel appropriately challenged and sufficiently supported to contribute to the success of the team, the organization and themselves.
Conclusion
Effective time management can be the difference between thriving and surviving. In an age of endless distractions, what matters is adhering to your personalized techniques to keep yourself appropriately sheltered from the noise and focused on what matters most: completing quality work on important tasks and assignments while being mindful of balancing your physical and mental wellbeing and that of others at work and home. The alternative is being overwhelmed by mounting responsibilities and incessant interruptions.
Auditing your time, identifying what really matters, prioritizing your tasks, blocking out calendar time for focused work and explaining your new approach to colleagues are evergreen strategies for effective time management. No matter how the professional world evolves, these processes are proven to work today and should continue to work for years to come.
For more insights on enhancing productivity and leadership skills, download the free guide, Managing Your Time Like a Pro: 7 Tips for Doing What Matters Most.