To be productive you need good time management skills

IN my previous two articles, we learned that personal productivity is the foundation of team and organizational productivity. To be productive, we need to have effective individuals who work together to achieve the goals of the organization.

Personal productivity determines the success or failure of the organization. Last week, we looked at some of the common misconceptions of productivity that could derail us from being effective in our work. This includes the misconception of doing more means greater productivity and multitasking. Busyness has nothing to do with productivity if the effort you put in does not produce the desired results.

In this article, we will look at the most important techniques that can help us to be more productive. When you assign your employees or subordinates to do a certain task, first and foremost, you must give them the time to do the task. Likewise, if you want to accomplish something, you must spend time on doing it. If you don’t have the time, you will never be able to accomplish your goal. This is the most basic principle of productivity.

Effective time management is the most important criterion of work productivity. What is time management? Can you manage time? The clock keeps ticking non-stop. You can’t stop time or create more time. All we have is 24 hours a day, no more and no less. If you lie idle and do nothing, time will not wait for you. Time just passes by. You will not be able get back those idle times.

What do you manage in time management? In reality, time management is about managing ourselves and managing our priorities. Let’s say you have 4 hours on a Monday morning. How do you use those 4 hours depends on what you want to do. If you do nothing, you know that you will not get those 4 hours back. If you have two unfinished reports, you need to decide which one you do first. You cannot multitask or do the two reports simultaneously. Time management is about what you decide to do in a given time. It is about your choice of what to do or do nothing. The worst enemy of time management is letting precious time leaks away without doing anything.

How do we decide which task we should do first? This is the second element which we need to manage in time management, that is, to manage our priorities. Not every task matters equally. Some tasks are more important than others. We need to choose what we will do in any given time. How to set priority in our work? Suppose you have ten items on you to-do-list; arrange the tasks in the order of importance with the most important task as No.1. No. 2 on the next most important task and so on until you reach No. 10. You start doing task No.1 first, then No. 2 until you finish the ten items in the descending order of importance. Barring from some work which maybe urgent and require your immediate attention, you should just do the most important task first, followed by the next most important task. This is prioritization. You choose what you do.

You should allocate more time to high level tasks. High level tasks are those which you cannot delegate to staff at a lower management level. Get low level jobs done quickly or delegate to your subordinates. With this work process, you should be able to improve your productivity and effectiveness.

What are the signs of true productivity? True productivity is not about how busy you appear to be or how many hours of work you put in. It is about achieving the desired results and goals effectively. To be truly productive, you must know what you want to achieve. At any moment, you must choose to do that one most important task which matters most to reaching your goal or getting the result. You must say “no” to distractions and low-value tasks or easier tasks. Instead, you should focus on high-impact tasks.

Most work consists of a series of tasks. When you are productive, you should have consistent progress. Progress is made when things are getting done and you are moving closer to your goal.

True signs of productivity mean that you can manage your time proactively and efficiently. You avoid double handling your tasks unnecessarily. You can point to real and concrete outcome, such as the report got done, problems solved, decisions made or revenue increased. There is a sense of ‘closure’ on the work where tasks are actually completed and not endlessly in progress.