We’ve all heard the saying, “Time is money”!
You waste time, means you’re wasting money for the organisation.
However, you may not have heard that “Time is more important than money”! You can always make more money in the future. However, you can never get back time that has already passed.
Each moment, each day, each year that has passed is ultimately gone forever. This is essentially why modern businesses are stressing the importance of effective time management skills. Time is a limited resource. To manage these hours requires time management skills, which are inevitably the methods we control and manipulate our time to achieve maximum results.
What are these time management skills though?
Types of Time Management Skills
-
Self-awareness
To control and manipulate your time, you need an acute sense of how you think and function as an individual. This is important because time management is unique to everyone. For example, some people are early birds and can perform their best in the morning period starting from 5:00am. Others are classified as night owls, who work best in the evening when the rest of the world is sleeping and there is less noise and distractions.
Other self-factors to consider are, are you a multitasker or prefer one task at a time? Do you prefer mundane routines or unstructured work hours? Identifying your relationship with time determines how you manage it.
-
Prioritising
You are ultimately human and would not be able to accomplish every single thing in one day. Therefore, it is imperative to know what the important tasks in your day are. Setting three to four important responsibilities to be done daily clarifies how to allocate time to the most pressing activities.
-
Decisiveness
This skill is the ability to use logic and available information to make a well-informed decision. These decisions relate to how much time to allocate to each priority. Being decisive helps you to effectively plan your day by allocating time accordingly.
-
Planning
Effective time management involves making necessary decisions to create a plan for your day. Many people do this at the start of their workday to provide some direction, create a schedule and ensure their priorities are met.
-
Stress Management
It is important to develop stress management. This ensures you operate at your optimum level and not react to random distractions. These distractions can consume your time which backs up your workload and leaves you feeling more stress that you have less time. Additionally, the more stressed you are, the more time is wasted due to your inability to focus and perform.
-
Delegation
An effective time management skill to keep stress down is delegation. As a human being, you will never have all the time or energy to accomplish everything at once. Utilise the team around you and delegate responsibilities. Delegation frees up your schedule to focus on your priorities and keep your stress levels manageable.
Time Management Skills in your Resume
Given that time management is deemed important by modern companies, recruiters will be looking for this skill in your resume. This skill demonstrates you understand the value of time and how it affects business operations, corporate reputation and profitability.
Time management reflects that you get your work completed and submitted without delays.
Secondly, highlight clearly in your resume that you not only manage your time well, but that of your superiors. Managers need people who can deliver – on time and on budget with high quality. This makes their job and life easier.
Common Time Management Interview Questions
During the interview, a recruiter is looking for a candidate who can display solid management in terms of workload and stress. They usually ask therefore, “how do you manage a heavy workload or a demanding schedule? Can you multitask well”? They are testing to see how you establish priorities in a hectic environment and what methods you use to deliver your work in a timely manner.
Employers frequently ask for solid examples. Do not be alarmed if you’re asked to provide an example of how you were able to meet a tight deadline or handle ones that were constantly changing. Employers would also be interested in would you be open to working overtime to complete an important question.Be very careful with this question though.
You want to communicate that you are a team player and would be willing to work overtime for an important project. However, emphasise that you typically do not work overtime often as you try to maximise your actual working hours. Employers generally do not want employees who consistently work overtime. It demonstrates poor time management, lack of focus and a lack of priority and planning.
How to Improve Time Management in the Workplace?
-
Improve Teamwork
A fundamental way to improve workplace time management is to improve the teamwork within the organisation. Working effectively as a team saves time because tasks can be delegated, staff members are collaborating, and information is being shared as to whether deadlines are being met and solutions are being implemented. Once the team is reliable and communicating well, it saves the entire team and company a lot of time.
-
Set realistic deadlines
Realistic deadlines must be set and communicated to ensure team members are aware of how much time is allocated for an assignment and the degree of work to be completed by such date.
-
Avoid procrastination
Procrastination is a thief of time and leads to idle time, increasing workload, less time to execute and greater stress. This is essentially why effective time management calls for a high level of self-awareness and decisiveness. It takes an understanding of one’s self and discipline to stick to a planned schedule and address the important tasks to be completed daily.
-
Take breaks and de-stress
When you seek to lower the stress levels of employees by taking breaks, teambuilding or otherwise, the team can function at an optimum level. Responsibilities can be executed on time and there is a more focused and strategic approach to getting things done.
