Time management is critical for nearly any job, ensuring professionals can work efficiently. As a result, they typically reduce friction for employees, boosting productivity and reducing stress levels.
While a multitude of time management skills are important, some provide value far quicker. Here’s a look at five time management skills that are worth acquiring and improving.
1. Scheduled To-Do Lists
To-do lists are a classic time management technique, allowing professionals to effectively track their responsibilities and manage their workloads. However, by combining a to-do list strategy with a calendar app, it’s far more effective.
Instead of simply jotting down what needs accomplishing in a day, professionals can allocate time on their calendars for every activity. That allows them to ensure they have enough time available to handle tasks and creates opportunities to schedule alerts to notify users when it’s time to transition to a new activity.
Plus, in shared calendar environments, the calendar-based approach lets others know that the user is occupied with other activities. As a result, there may be fewer interruptions, making it easier to stay productive.
2. Prioritization
The ability to prioritize tasks based on their importance or value is critical for effective time management. It ensures professionals concentrate on tasks that are crucial first. That includes duties that are more meaningful to operations, dependencies for the work of others, and more.
3. Single-Tasking
While multitasking skills are touted as a key to productivity, the vast majority of people can’t genuinely multitask. Instead, they rapidly transition between activities. During that process, there’s a period of refamiliarization before they can begin again, something that actually slows progress.
For better time management, developing single-tasking skills is genuinely the better choice. That involves focusing on a single responsibility until the activity is complete, a strategy that leads to higher concentration and quicker outputs.
4. Organization
Organization skills ensure professionals don’t waste time locating the materials they need to handle a task. With everything in its place, it’s far easier to find what’s required quickly.
Many software solutions can improve organization. For example, project management applications can coordinate materials for group endeavors, while applicant tracking systems make tracking candidate data easier.
5. Effective Use of Automation
Automation allows professionals to streamline tedious tasks by using software to handle highly repetitive activities. Report running, task assignments, data entry across systems, candidate communications, and many other activities are solid potential targets for automation.
While automation itself isn’t inherently a time management skill, the effective use of automation solutions easily qualifies. As a result, anyone looking to improve their efficiency should take advantage of automated technologies and learn how to make the most of them, allowing them to boost their productivity, reduce errors, and otherwise boost their performance.
Bottom Line
Ultimately, time management is often critical for success. The five skills outlined above are only part of the equation, but they’re excellent places to start for anyone looking to reduce friction.
If you want to make your onboarding process frictionless by introducing modern onboarding technology, Essium can help. Contact us to learn more about our comprehensive and streamlined onboarding solutions and how they can benefit your staffing firm.
