Time. We all wish we had more of it. Yet no matter how hard we try to conserve it, it seems to slip away from us in drips and drabs.
This is especially concerning if you’re in charge of a team of people responsible for ensuring your business runs smoothly and efficiently. If you can help every team member become more effective, think how much time you’ll save overall! Here are five time management secrets to teach today.
- Shorten Those To-Do Lists
One of the biggest time sucks is the endless to-do list. Filled with small and often nonessential items, to-do lists are only useful if they serve the purpose of helping people be more productive. Teach team members easy way to shorten to-do lists, like getting rid of all items they’ll do no matter what. Think “check email” or “get lunch.” Scratch easy tasks that don’t need to happen right away; they often become tempting due to their simplicity, and end up taking precedence over harder but more crucial chores.
Belle Cooper recommends moving tasks that depend on other people somewhere else (to a follow-up list, for instance, or a shared project) so that you don’t have to feel the nagging pressure of tasks you can’t complete on your own. Teach your employees how to distinguish between tasks they can and should do right away, and those that should be filed somewhere else or ditched altogether.
- Take Time to Be Creative
Creativity is crucial. It makes people feel happier, more productive and more in charge of their own work lives. It’s an amazing way to give your workers a little freedom, boosting their brainpower and making them more efficient when they return to regular tasks. Of course, creativity must still fall within the scope of the job, but giving workers time to explore, read, create or invent can immeasurably improve attitude, moral and time effectiveness.
- Create a System for Email
Ah, email. To reduce mental space and inbox space wasted by email, teach employees to deal with it right away. “Inbox Zero” should always be the goal, so read, reply or file instantly to reduce inbox clutter and improve efficiency.
- Handle a Task Once, and Once Only
The “One-Touch Rule” can significantly limit the amount of time employees spend waffling between tasks and feeling mentally burdened by chores that seem to haunt them forever. We all know that feeling of picking up and putting a task down so many times that it becomes a huge monkey on our backs.
Instead, teach employees to process each task as soon as it reaches them. If it’s an email: read, reply or file. If it’s a piece of paperwork, they should complete it, photocopy it or file it away. Whatever the task, when it comes across an employee’s desk, they should know how to handle it immediately.
Note that some tasks can’t be done at that moment, in which case processing it means filing it in the right place for later, then putting a date on the calendar for when it will be dealt with and how. Some tasks are also large, in which case processing can mean breaking the task into steps and waiting until there’s enough time to complete them. Whatever the case, ignoring the task is the No. 1 time-wasting no-no, so offer better alternatives.
- Have an End-Of-Day Routine
At the end of the day, teach each employee to create a short to-do list for the next, containing only the highest priority tasks, and unclutter their work space so it will be fresh and ready for the following day.
Time management doesn’t need to feel impossible when you institute these tips in every worker’s daily routine!