Working in an office environment isn’t as easy as people think. You will know that when working in an office, time flies by and it can be hard to keep on top of your day-to-day tasks. You could be chatting away with your colleagues or replying to lengthy emails with clients. All of this can take up your time and then you will realise you have very little time to complete your work.
According to an article from the business wire, employees lose a third of their time on admin work. If you work in an office environment and are losing time but don’t know how we will give you a step-by-step guide on how to manage your time better in a work environment.
There are endless benefits to time management which is why you must work on improving it. It can improve the quality of your work and make you less stressed. It will also help you with procrastination and free up time so you can spend time researching or enjoying your life.
One of the first steps to ensuring you are improving your time management is to see where you are losing time. Losing time means you are losing money. When you are budget planning, you identify where you are spending money so you can cut back on those costs. It is the same as managing your time. You must identify how and where you are spending your time.
There are many websites to use where you can see how you can optimise your time better. These will identify periods in the day where you are less productive and where you are productive. It will also tell you what you are losing your time on.
One of the best things you can do when you are trying to optimise your time is to create a daily schedule. It is something you should do in the morning before you do anything else. Maybe have breakfast or shower to wake you up but then you must write down your daily schedule. It will not only help you become more organised but it will also remind you of the stuff you need to do. That includes going to the gym, emailing a client or even completing a work task. Commit yourself to these tasks to ensure they are completed and then you can optimise your time.
The next thing you need to do is create a priority list for work tasks. Once you have written everything down that you need to do in the day, a priority list is something else you should do. A large list of all the tasks you need to do can be very overwhelming which is why you need to prioritise them. There are multiple ways you can do this.
The first method would be to write a number next to each task so you complete them in numerical order. The other method is to write another list but order them so the highest priority is at the top and the lowest priority is at the bottom. The next method would be to colour code the tasks, with specific colours being at a certain time of the day.
With this priority list, you can schedule tasks for another day because they are not urgent. You can also delegate some of your tasks to other colleagues. That way, you are freeing up more time for yourself and causing less stress.
Something else you need to do is to decide on your most strenuous task and deal with it first. This is called Eat The Frog method which is a strategy for those who get easily distracted. It is the task that you keep putting off and leave it until the back end of the day. Don’t do that and make a change by starting the most difficult task first. Then move on to the next task once you have completed that task.
Setting time limits is another method to tackle time management. Working on Parkinson’s Law is a great way to optimise your time. Parkinson’s Law is the idea that work expands to fill the time allocated for completion. Therefore, if you give yourself only two tasks to complete during the day when in reality, they only take 2 hours, you should set yourself more tasks with time limits. That will ensure you are making most of the time in the day during work hours.
As soon as you optimise your time at work, your life will become stress-free. You will no longer need to do work on the weekends because you get the chance to complete it during the week. That is something we all hate so improve your time management at work and then you can treat yourself to some new clothes at a shopping centre in Leeds at the weekend, without thinking about work.
