How to manage time to get everything done: developing time management skills

ayshakhatunasha

Case Study 1 : Over the past year, XYZ Tech Solutions has restructured its business processes, expanded its service offerings, and acquired new clients. The changes have resulted in the existing team having to meet increasingly tight project deadlines and client expectations. The IT company prides itself on its commitment to developing innovative solutions, but this commitment often results in employees working long hours, being overworked, unmotivated, under constant stress, delaying orders, and trying to meet deadlines at the last minute.

Case Study 2. Anna is a talented business analyst who has been working at ABC for about a year. During the interview and hiring process, she received an excellent recommendation and impressed with her professional skills and problem-solving abilities. However, over the past few months, colleagues and managers have noticed that Anna is constantly delaying tasks and failing to meet project deadlines. This affects not only the quality of Anna’s work, but also that of the entire project team. Anna is stressed and demotivated, but is unable to concentrate and plan her work. Unfulfilled commitments and postponed order delivery dates undermine the company’s reputation in the eyes of partners and prevent it from achieving its goals.

How to manage time to get everything done: developing time management skills in a team in 10 approaches. Photo 1
If your team works "like clockwork", then perhaps this is not your topic. However, if the situations resonate, and there is a desire to minimize or eliminate the likelihood of something like this in the company, we are ready to help reduce risks and build a "working" time management system.

Developing Time Management Skills in a Team in 10 Approaches
All stories are united by the problem of planning the working time of an individual or a team. Despite the fact that today almost every candidate indicates time management skills in their resume, according to statistics, only 18% of employees have a time management system. As a result, 51% of the working day is used inefficiently, which leads to loss of productivity, emotional burnout, crises in the team, reputational risks and financial losses for the company.

Thematic corporate trainings and individual practices help develop time management skills - the ability to combine planning and prioritization for the most effective use of time in achieving goals.

There is no universal algorithm for developing this skill, but there are key elements without which it is difficult to develop the ability to “manage time”.

Prioritization. Determine which tasks to start immediately, which to postpone, and which to delegate or cancel. The Eisenhower Matrix, Pareto's Law, or the ABC Method are useful here.

How to manage time to get everything virtual phone number service  done: developing time management skills in a team in 10 approaches. Photo 2
Eisenhower Matrix. The essence of the approach is that tasks are distributed in priority: a) if the task is urgent and important, do it first; c) if the task is important, but not urgent, schedule it for later; d) if the task is urgent, but not so important, delegate or outsource; d) if the task is neither urgent nor important, do not do it at all.

Pareto's Law or the 80/20 Principle . Pareto's Law states: "20% of the effort produces 80% of the result, and the remaining 80% of the effort produces only 20% of the result." We determine which tasks have the greatest impact on key performance indicators and organizational goals, and solve them first.

The ABC method. We measure the importance of tasks and rank them by category. Category "A" - tasks that require urgent completion or are considered very important for the organization. Tasks that are important in the long term, but not immediately, are rated "B". Tasks that would be useful to complete, but they will change little in achieving the main goals, fall into the "C" category. We devote most of the day to completing category "A" tasks. After completing them, we move on to category "B" tasks. Tasks rated "C" are planned for free time.

Audit of working time . This approach is similar to the approach of daily budgeting or expenses. We take into account how much time we spend on the processes performed during the working day, analyze and see how much time certain types of work take on average. There is an understanding of what we manage to do during the day. The method of Professor A. Lyubishchev is a clear example of the effectiveness of the approach.




Time slots . We allocate and fix time for the tasks that we plan to complete on a specific day. This strategy is known as "timeboxing". Timeboxing can be organized in different ways, for example, using the "pomodoro method" or the "52/17 rule". Regardless of which technique we choose, for the approach to work, it is necessary to stop working on a specific task after the allotted time has elapsed.