While everyone has the same 24 hours every day, we all manage them in different ways. The strategy of your choice can be the difference between accomplishing all your goals and barely managing a small part of them. Consequently, managing time effectively is important—especially for those with lots of responsibilities, like business owners and team leaders. A few essential time management skills can help you get the most from your work—and help your staff do the same.
In this guide, we’ll be exploring exactly that: a few essential time management skills for leaders, business owners, and anyone else with busy schedules. Before our main topic, let’s cover why essential time management skills matter in the first place.
Why Essential Time Management Skills Matter
Unlike lots of other resources, you cannot replace time. Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back. As a result, using it effectively is vital.
Managing your time well will allow you to get more done in the same period. You’ll be able to complete more tasks or produce higher-quality work. While this is important for any professional, it’s especially vital when making decisions for your business and your staff.
Every choice you make will affect your employees in one way or another. Sometimes, these effects will be short-lived. But other times, they can be long-lasting. This highlights the importance of making good decisions, which you may do with a strategy like data-driven decision making. These strategies require a decent amount of time to take advantage of effectively—emphasizing why time management skills are important.
Top Essential Time Management Skills for Leaders and Beyond
Mastering time management involves several skills. The essential time management skills we’re going to cover in this guide are the following:
- Prioritization
- Planning
- Organization
- Delegation
- Avoiding Distractions
- Boundary Setting
- The Ability to Say No
Let’s explore each in-depth now, starting with the first one: task prioritization,
Prioritization
Not all tasks are created equal. Some are more important than others, and being able to distinguish them from one another is an important skill. Prioritizing your assignments correctly will allow you to complete your most important tasks quickly and produce higher-quality work.
There are lots of ways to practice this skill. Some task management strategies like the Eisenhower Matrix can help you prioritize your work ahead of time. Speaking of which, planning is the next essential time management skill we’re going to cover.
Planning
Planning what tasks you’ll be working on ahead of time will give your days a structure to follow. Without this, you can very easily waste lots of time figuring out what to work on next. Think of a good plan as a map—it will guide you throughout your work over the course of your day.
Besides planning your days, you can go one step further and plan an entire week in advance. There are many time management techniques you can use for this—like day theming, which assigns certain types of tasks to specific days in your calendar. This can be especially effective for your team. The strategy involves grouping similar tasks together to avoid switching between different types of assignments. However, be sure to avoid grouping too many repetitive tasks together, as your staff can get bored quickly with the technique.
Organization
Staying organized is one of the foundational elements of good time management. This applies to all aspects of your work: your physical workspace, projects and tasks, long-term goals, and more. If you and your team are disorganized, you’ll spend a lot of time searching for things. You’ll waste not only time but your team’s valuable energy, which could be used for tasks that matter instead.
Fortunately, staying organized isn’t a difficult task. However, it requires constant effort. For your physical workspace, keep it tidy and make sure your staff do the same. For your digital one, use a productivity tool with management functionality to stay organized. As an example, you can use Project and Task Management in WebWork to keep your team’s daily work processes running smoothly.
Delegation
As a leader, you can’t do everything yourself. You’ll likely be faced with lots of tasks every day, many of which you’ll have to delegate. While this is one of the most essential time management skills every leader should have, it can also be useful for the rest of your team. Specifically, if your managers and supervisors know how to delegate effectively, they can do their work better.
The first step to delegating is prioritizing your tasks. After you’ve identified lower-priority assignments, you should start looking for who to delegate them to. This will depend greatly on your employees’ skills and workload, so each case will be different.
Avoiding Distractions
Distractions are everywhere in today’s world. Whether it’s work-related distractions like emails and other tasks or ones relating to your personal life—they can hurt your productivity. This issue can be even more significant in remote working or teleworking arrangements. In such cases, you can’t guarantee that your team members are working in distraction-free places.
This essential time management skill involves quite a bit of discipline. You and your team will need the willpower to not get tempted by distractions and remain focused on your active tasks. But, there are things you can do to make this skill easier to attain, like setting boundaries between your personal and work lives. While this will only help you avoid non-work-related distractions, it will still have a measurable effect on your productivity.
Setting Boundaries
Setting adequate boundaries between your work and personal lives is vital to achieving a healthy work-life balance. If you’re not aware, a healthy balance between the two plays an important role in your productivity in the long term. Failing to maintain a healthy work-life balance will quickly result in overworking and burnout. If this happens to your staff, your business could experience lots of negative effects like increased turnover.
Fortunately, setting boundaries—especially for your team, is fairly simple. Avoid working outside of your set hours and encourage your employees to do the same. If you work for extended hours, avoid contacting your team outside of their schedules. This way, they won’t be tempted to start working when they’re supposed to rest.
The Ability to Say No
This essential time management skill is closely tied to our last point of discussion. Saying no is a type of boundary, but one that you will use a lot in work—especially when talking with partners and clients. Learn to decline requests that don’t align with your priorities. Aim to be firm, yet polite. Make sure your staff can do the same as well, especially if working with various third parties is a part of their jobs.
Enhancing Your Essential Time Management Skills with Time Tracking
Time tracking is a powerful way to improve your time management. It helps you see where your time goes and identify areas for improvement. High-quality apps like WebWork will help you utilize your essential time management skills effectively to perform your best. However, such apps are particularly helpful for your team.
You can use time tracking apps not only to help your team develop their time management skills, but also to boost their productivity. You’ll also be able to manage your staff easily, helping you free up more of your valuable work hours for important tasks.
Final Thoughts
Essential time management skills are tools that help you take control of your day. They allow you to focus on what matters and work more efficiently.
For leaders, these skills are especially important. They can help you guide your team to meet goals and avoid burnout. But you don’t need to be in charge of a team to benefit from better time management. Anyone can learn these skills and use them to improve their life—both at work and outside of it.
Start with simple steps like prioritizing your tasks, staying organized, and setting boundaries between your work and personal lives. Incorporate time tracking software in your workflows to monitor your progress and make any necessary adjustments.
