Time management tips for young managers
In this blog, I want to share few tips on time management for young managers which helps in increasing productivity and efficiency.
Many young managers struggle to get through the day. They are always trying to find time to do things that they were supposed to do.
There are so many distractions, it just seems there is not enough time. This leads to frustrations and impact on productivity of a manager.
One of the main reason behind this is not being organised while planning the activities for the day. Time management is one of the crucial skill for everybody, but it is the most ignored skill.
Young managers must learn to improve time management skill to find time for strategic activities that add value to the organisation and in-turn increasing the chances of growth.
In this blog, I will share few tips on time management to become more productive.
The situation
When anybody moves into management, the most struggling aspect is how to get time to finish the work on time.
Due to increased responsibility and accountability, new managers suddenly start feeling the exhaustion of time. This will be immediately evident as their productivity suddenly drops.
Unfortunately, many organisation don’t put enough effort to make the transition to management role smooth.
One of the skill that a manager should learn and improve upon is time management as there are additional responsibilities and accountabilities.
Following are some of the added responsibilities when compared to an individual contributor.
▪ Being available for meetings
▪ Being available for all the team members
▪ Being available for peer managers to collaborate
▪ Being available for higher management to provide updates
▪ Being available for any other peer teams
Since there are added responsibilities, it becomes at-most important for young managers to manage the time properly, otherwise it will lead to lower productivity.
The tips
Following are 5-tips that you can follow to organise your time better.
▸ Tip#1: Create prioritise list of activities
The usual practice is to create a to-do list for the day. In this to-do list there will be sometimes tasks from previous days if it has not been completed.
A to-do list is good when there is no urgency for any of the task. If you just want to complete a set of tasks for the day, then it is a right fit. It is like picking up groceries from a super market; it does not matter in which order you pick up the items as long as all the items are picked up.
But for a manager a simple to-do list will not help all the time. The urgency of each activity or task must be considered to sequence it appropriately. Without this you might be spending time on tasks which are not really urgent.
So creating a prioritised to-do list will help organise your time to those tasks which have higher priority and then move down to the lower ones.
In this way you make sure the most high priority or high urgency tasks are completed before the finish of the day and the ones which has lower urgency can be either delegated or moved to next day.
▸ Tip#2: Delegate tasks
Some of the lower urgent tasks which are simple enough to be done, can be delegated to one of the team member who have enough knowledge about it and that member can do it with minimal supervision.
This will save some time and also helps to keep up your productivity.
Many young managers make a mistake of not delegating things. Whether it is to design a software module or to create simple reports or to attend meetings or anything that requires minimal supervision.
As a manager, if you don’t utilise delegation, then you will be always catching up, as there is no end to new tasks coming in every day.
By delegation, you will save time and creates a shared responsibility with your team members. This could also lead to creating learning opportunities for your team members.
▸ Tip#3: Learn to say no gracefully
Many young manager face a dilemma while accepting a new request from peer managers or higher managers. These kind of requests keeps coming in and all the requests will have high urgency.
This puts managers in a difficult situation. There seems to be no way out of it. Always chasing in answering and working on such requests. These kind of requests also lowers the productivity of a manager.
So, my suggestion is to learn to say NO to such request gracefully. What I mean is, all requests should not be accepted as a high urgency request.
Everyone has requests and it could be high priority for them. Since you are the one who has to do something, you must create a priority queue for such requests.
When somebody says it is urgent, well you have to explain that there are other high priority items, so it will take some time to get to the new request.
You acknowledge the other person’s urgency and by explaining your situation to negotiate a better timeline will ease the pressure on you.
▸ Tip#4: Minimise distractions
Young managers get distracted by social media updates, calls from home, unscheduled meetings, breaks and so on.
These distractions might be needed, but it should be controlled.
Without a controlled distraction, you will keep losing focus on the task as the rhythm in which you were doing the task is lost. Due to this you might end up restarting from beginning; waste of time!
The best thing to do is to reserve time for such ad-hoc requests and distractions. And inform everyone that you will be available for any ad-hoc discussion or calls during that time of the day only.
By reserving a time for such activities will help you to focus on the priority task, finish it and then take a break during the reserved time.
▸ Tip#5: Avoid lot of multi-tasking
Due to fear of not completing all the required tasks for the day, many managers do lot of multi-tasking.
Multi-tasking is good but it should be controlled. If you are doing too many things like responding to chat messages, responding emails, talking in meeting, calculating something in the Excel to generate a report etc. then nothing will be right and results in rework.
In my opinion, you should not do more than 2 tasks at any given time. We are humans not machines to do many things at an instant. Our focus will be lost if we try to do more than two things at a time.
So avoid lot of multi-tasking and focus on the task in hand. When there is complete focus, you will finish that task correctly and avoid doing rework.
Final thoughts
As managers, if we manage our time better then,
▪ productivity increases,
▪ reduces stress,
▪ more time for strategic things and,
▪ more time for family.
This in-turn creates a work life balance.
Let me know what is your tip for effective time management.
Happy management!
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