Leadership Principles // Top Tools and Techniques to help with Time Management

Leadership Principles // Top Tools and Techniques to help with Time Management

 By now I am sure we already know the myriad advantages that come with joining a coworking space.

But the same benefits that make coworking facilities so beneficial for productivity can also leave you feeling like you don’t have enough time in your day. 

Let’s face it, most of us could use help with time management even under normal circumstances.

The proximately to like-minded professionals that increase your network and spur your creativity in a coworking space like Nairobi Garage, can also be a distraction from your work. 

Time management is the process of planning how to efficiently use and control the time you spend on different aspects of your day.

Those who master time management, say their work quality improves, they have less stress, more time to work on strategic projects and they are more confident.

There is a need for you to embrace a few time management techniques especially if you are working from a flexible workspace to avoid burnout.

So, we’ve assembled a few time-management tips and tools that will help you focus your energy and attention and help keep your productivity level, and your business, ticking along smoothly.

Time management techniques

Delegation

As a business leader, are you doing tasks you should not be? It’s hard to delegate, especially when your business is growing. 

However, if you do not delegate, you end up with a huge to-do list. As a result, you slow the overall progress of the business down. You need to learn to let go and do the things only you, the leader, can do.

So, have a think about what you could delegate. Then, read our tips on how to delegate effectively.

Turn off notifications

A study at the University of California found that it takes the average person 23 minutes to refocus after a distraction. 

What is the most common type of distraction these days? Those annoying notifications lighting up your phone screen or popping up on your desktop. So, let’s keep it simples – turn them off.

By doing so, you will find you focus for longer and get more done in a shorter amount of time.

Have time to rest

Another key technique to manage your time effectively is to schedule in your rest time. It may seem counterintuitive to say that you can get more work done by scheduling time away from work, but it is amazingly effective.

Make yourself more productive by setting hard edges on your day. Try to leave the office at a certain time every day. Schedule fun activities on the weekends rather than allowing yourself to let tasks spill over into the weekend. Take days off to clear your head and come back to your work fresh.

Hold more productive meetings

Business Meetings can be highly productive, offering insights into your organization and employees. They also offer a perfect platform for brainstorming and more.

Also Read // Time Management Hacks for Marketers

However, business meetings also have a downside. If dragged for far too long, chances of achieving nothing, and blocking employees from completing their work and meeting important deadlines can be evident.

When you are time-poor as a leader, there is nothing worse than coming out of a meeting and thinking ‘that was a waste of my time.’ So, a good time management technique is to hold more productive meetings. For teams, we have shared previously tips on how you can decline meetings respectfully. Here are some top tips to make sure your and your team’s meetings are worthwhile:

• Don’t invite everyone – only invite those who have a real reason to be there
• Create and stick to an agenda – don’t let the meeting deviate from your outcomes
• Send any information out ahead of time – don’t waste time presenting information, send it to people beforehand so they can digest it in their own time

You can also take a step further and think: could this meeting be an email?

Time Management Tools

Simply said, the point of time management tools is to help you manage your time better. By using time management tools, you can become more productive, make better decisions about your time and reduce the time you spend on things like reporting and invoicing.

When we talk about time management tools, you have to be aware that it’s quite easy to become enthusiastic about a new tool. The hard part is consistently using the selected tool. 

That’s why you first need a really good reason why you want to become better at time management (to earn more, to have more free time …), then find the most appropriate tool for your goal and, finally, you have to use the tool long enough to get used to it.

Here is a list of things with which time management tools can help you the most:

• Writing down your goals (clearly defined goals help with time management tremendously)
• Organizing your week and scheduling how you will spend your time in advance
• Having an overview of all the tasks that need to be completed (with deadlines)
• Prioritizing your tasks (or not forgetting about them)
• Recording and analyzing all the time spent (for optimization purposes)

Now let’s look at some of the tools that will help you:

Trello

Trello boards are the ultimate in to-do lists. They allow you to organize your work better and track tasks on a step-by-step basis. 

You can share your ‘boards’ and task ‘cards’ across teams and assign tasks to different users.

Basecamp

According to their website, ‘basecamp is more than just a project management tool – it’s a better way to work.’

Basecamp is a straightforward platform to use and allows you to seamlessly share and review documents. You can chat with your team through Basecamp, rather than clogging up everyone’s inboxes – it means everything your team needs is in one place, allowing your entire business to use their time more efficiently.

Zapier

As a business leader, there might be straightforward admin tasks that you do yourself or delegate that could be done automatically. Zapier allows you to do exactly that.

This platform allows you to connect different platforms together and performs actions you’d ordinarily have to do manually. 

For example, if you’re a marketing agency promoting an upcoming webinar and one of your team is manually sending links to whoever registers, Zapier will give that team member or yourself a lot of time back. 

You can simply set up a trigger for when someone fills out that registration form and Zapier can send an email from your outlook account automatically.

OneNote

Office 365 offers many tools to help manage time more effectively; these include Sharepoint and Microsoft teams. In the day-to-day running of your business, there’s a lot to remember. This is where OneNote can be life-changing in terms of time management.

OneNote allows you to upload and make notes online in one central place. You can have sub-folders of notes and share these with team members. 

One of our best tips for remaining focused on the task at hand is to limit task-switching. So, if something else for the ‘to-do list’ pops into your head when working on another task, drop it as a note into your OneNote and you can come back to it later. By having one place online for all your notes, rather than bits and bobs of paper, you’ll save yourself time and get more done.

There are many ‘note-taking’ applications out there, but OneNote is effective and quite often, is something people already have with an Office 365 subscription. Now is the time to make use of it.