Acquire Excellent Time Management Skills in a Work Place

Time management is one of the most difficult forms of management in the workplace. Not anyone likes or skilful in managing their time.

As a result, time lost will never comeback and these employees are either forced to work overtime or has a decreased work productivity output. The end result is high employment cost (cost due to overtime), quality is affected (tired workers doing overtime will never produce quality results), employee moral is degraded (especially if the guilt feelings due to unaccomplished or delayed tasks will accumulate over the period of time in addition to frequent nagging by the boss).

Aside from “office politics” and meetings which are the number one time wasters, any employees can carefully manage their time by following a simple, easy and universal approach to time management.

By reading this short guide, you do not need to attend time management seminars which last more than hour (again wasting your time), or any type of boring time management conferences. As simple as having PC and an Excel spreadsheet (even a notebook or any piece of paper will do), one can skillfully manage their time like a professional (not only managers are required but even a cigarette vendor in the streets can benefit in time management).

These are the steps:

Step1: Open an Excel spreadsheet or get a piece of paper (notebook is recommended).

Step2: Make a column and in that first column, write down ALL your tasks assigned to you as well as other tasks that you think you need to do. Do not limit the list according to what has been said by your boss , or to yourself or co-workers, write down ALL tasks even it includes “Checking my facebook account for updates”.
Name this first column as “Task name”.
 
Step3: Make 3 columns besides task name, name it as “IMPORTANCE”, “URGENCY”, “JOB PERFORMANCE RELEVANCE”.

It should look like below:


Step4: Assign ratings to IMPORTANCE, URGENCY AND JOB PERFORMANCE RELEVANCE columns according to this rule:

Importance column rating;
1- No importance (no relation to company goals)
2- Moderate importance (attainment of other department goals but not your own department)
3- High Importance (attainment of your own department goals)

Urgency column rating:
1 – Deadline is set next month or no deadline
2 – With deadlines set tomorrow or next week
3 – Deadline is today

Job performance relevance rating:
1 – Not related at all to your job description.
2 – Job description and responsibilties assigned to you but not stated in your original employment contract.
3 – Direct job description and responsibilities stated in your employment contract.

Step5: Multiply them altogether like the one shown in the above screenshot. The result total is the overall score.

Step6. Do things first with the highest score and in the decreasing order.

So this means that in the above screenshot, a person should be making yield reports first, followed by defect analysis, attending meetings and finally checking facebook updates when all important/urgent/high related jobs are done already. But if you asked; how come QA meetings deadline is today but the person is doing defect analysis which is next months deadline?

Answer: The fact that you can say NO to any meetings. Just say NO and tell them you have other important tasks to do first. Not a partly yes or no answer.

Sadly, if you are a manager reading this guide, you will observed that not even one of your employees are doing this. Bear in mind that low productivity can also reflect managers performance so teach this guide to your employees and implement strictly as possible.