4 Strategies for Improving Employee Time Management Skills
You might be losing over 10 hours a week to poor time management—that’s over an entire workday of productivity lost.
Employees, reclaiming your time means you reclaiming your wellness! Strengthening your time management skills can lead to enhanced job satisfaction, improved work-life balance, increased concentration, boosted productivity, and other benefits that will make your professional life more rewarding.
Here at Frankly, we want to help you learn critical information and strategies that you can use to improve your time management skills and take back your time. This blog will discuss:
- The effects of poor time management
- Strategies for improving time management
- How Frankly can help
The Negative Effects
Time management is often sacrificed through seemingly brief interruptions; this can come about in the form of small distractions like social media breaks, coworker conversations, loud work environments, procrastination, or checking emails. As small as these seem, little moments of mismanagement add up and lead to a great loss of hours.
The consequences of poor time management can be detrimental not just to your job performance, but to your wellness as an employee too. The damaging effects include:
- Decreased productivity
Poor time management skills lead to employees spending their time away from completing their work responsibilities. On average, this wasted time results in nearly 1.5 hours of productivity lost daily and a 40% decrease in company efficiency.
- Increased stress levels
When employees struggle to manage their time, their work tends to pile up, causing an excess of work close to deadlines. This often leads employees to feel overwhelmed by their last-minute workload, resulting in heightened stress and anxiety.
The link below offers another Frankly blog that gives tips for overcoming general stress and anxiety in the workplace.
https://www.franklyhelp.com/blog/what-you-need-to-know-to-beat-anxiety/
- Risk of burnout
When employees push work to the last minute, they face continuous overworking while attempting to finish their tasks and responsibilities. This overworking and intense workload leads to exhaustion and disengagement from work as employees get burned out. Burned-out employees are less productive and more prone to errors, which reinforces the stress they likely already feel.
- Poor work-life balance
Employees who can’t manage their time efficiently may have to work extended hours, which means that work encroaches on personal time. This imbalance between work and personal life often leads to job dissatisfaction and a decrease in overall wellbeing/happiness.
Click below for another Frankly blog that further discusses creating a healthy work-life balance.
- Damage to relationships
Time management can often cause tension between coworkers due to the stress produced from wasted time. The anxiety that results from intense workload and close deadlines often leads employees to become irritable and misdirect their stress towards their coworkers. This then leads to tense feelings within a team, thus decreasing workplace morale.
Also, a single employee’s poor time management can often cause their coworkers to have to pick up the slack. The employee then becomes burdensome to their coworkers, which creates further workplace tension.
- Loss of revenue
Time management isn’t just a personal issue. Poor time management skills and workplace distractions cost U.S. companies about $588 billion a year. This is often caused by employees losing customers because of missed deadlines and low work quality.
Overall, poor time management creates endless problems for both individual employees and companies as a whole. The effects of wasted time can be detrimental to your mental health and wellness as well as your reputation as a professional.
Let’s, then, investigate the ways in which we can improve our time management skills and reclaim the health, productivity, and revenue lost to wasted time.
Improving Your Skills
If you struggle with time management in your workplace, don’t worry. There are plenty of strategies you can use to strengthen your skills and avoid time-wasting habits. Here’s a list of 4 strategies for you to try:
- Time blocking
Time blocking is a great way to definitively plan your time in a way that makes it clear what each hour of your day should be dedicated to. Before each day, consider what tasks need to be completed and divide the next 24 hours into short blocks of time with each block allocated to a specific task.
Blocking out your time in this way will help you stay aware of how long you should be working and what task you should focus on. Be sure to schedule regular breaks for meals and relaxation to clear your mind and consider your health.
You can utilize online programs like Monday.com, ClickUp, and Wrike to help you organize your time blocking and track your work progress.
- Pomodoro Technique
One of the major influences of poor time management is procrastination about tasks that seem excessively challenging or time consuming. To prevent procrastination, the Pomodoro Technique makes tasks seem more achievable by chunking time into manageable periods.
The technique involves breaking work into short, focused intervals that last anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes. After working for the designated amount of time, a 5-minute break should be taken. After 4 cycles of this pattern, you should take a longer break for 15 to 30 minutes.
By following this technique, you can boost your productivity and time management by making the task seem less intimidating. The technique also reduces fatigue, improves concentration, and heightens motivation.
- Eisenhower Matrix
One thing that makes it difficult to know which tasks to tackle when using the time blocking and Pomodoro Techniques is not being able to discern what tasks deserve the most amount of time and attention. The Eisenhower Matrix is a time management strategy that helps to prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance.
The matrix divides tasks into four quadrants:
- Urgent and Important – Tasks that require immediate attention and are critical for achieving goals
- Important but Not Urgent – Tasks that are important to long-term success and company growth but don't need immediate attention.
- Urgent but Not Important – Distractions that demand immediate action but don’t significantly contribute to long-term goals.
- Not Urgent and Not Important – Low-value, unnecessary activities that should be eliminated or limited.
Using this strategy will help you determine which tasks should be prioritized above others when planning out your time.
- Use a calendar or planner
Using a calendar or planner can help you to organize your meetings, deadlines, and projects so that you can visually map your schedule by day, week, or month. Doing this will help to avoid missing tasks or double-scheduling events. This will also help you assign specific times to work on tasks and give you space to manage your time blocking.
You can use a physical calendar/planner or an electronic version through Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, or Fantastical.
How Can Frankly Help?
Although these techniques are great ways to start working towards improving your time management skills, they may not work for everyone. At Frankly, we understand that your needs are personalized to you, and we’re here to offer health and wellness sessions that serve that personalization.
We will pair you with a wellness coach who will help you find time-management strategies that work best for you. Our holistic approach to health and wellness will ensure that your sessions will discuss not just time-management issues, but any of your wellness concerns. You will have the opportunity to create a wellness plan that is unique to you and your company to tackle the topics that matter most to you.
To learn more about Frankly's sessions, book a 15-minute demo.
Working with Time Management
Finding a time management strategy that helps you better organize your workdays will lead to a multitude of benefits like better job satisfaction, stronger team culture, better decision making, improved focus, more free time, and, most importantly, improved productivity.
Improving your time management skills won’t just make you a better employee, it will also give you the opportunity to experience a happier life without the stress of looming deadlines and intense workloads that overwhelm your day.
Marissa Adams
Resources
Comments ()