Time management is an important skill for project managers but can these skills be improved?
CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Indeed
Project time management is a great way to enhance productivity in your organisation; keeping team members focused on their individual responsibilities, and the overall project goals, can enhance customer satisfaction by ensuring clients get their products on time.
Project management experts will use several strategies to complete their tasks on time, the most important of which is to develop a project plan.
A project plan is a structure and schedule that the project follows. It can outline tasks, their timelines and the team members responsible for them. Ensure all team members understand, and are comfortable with, the plan. Factors you may consider during schedule planning include:
each team member’s responsibility;
the availability of resources, and the time to transport them to the site;
the plan’s ability to accommodate changes when necessary;
the availability of expertise within your team to complete the project’s tasks;
the project’s expectations;
the project’s scope.
Aspects of this overall plan should be carefully thought through – for example:
Defining your activities
Start by identifying the project’s expectations and defining its activities. Use a work breakdown structure to organise each task in an easy-to-follow format. Work breakdown structures are tools that divide projects into smaller, more manageable, chunks and can help you create more detailed plans with clearer deliverables.
Arranging activities in a sequence
Sequencing is important because it can help you outline and visualise the project, giving you a clearer picture of its scope. It can also help to ensure you remember each task when work begins. Use diagrams to organise the tasks you identified in step one in the order to ensure you plan to complete them.
Seting time limits
While a project owner may tell you when they expect you to complete the entire project, it’s often the project manager’s job to allocate time to individual tasks, and setting time limits for each task is crucial to ensuring your team stay on schedule. You can use general time guidelines, such as indicating ‘by the end of week one’, or stating specific dates.
Prioritising your assignments
Prioritisation can help you prevent disruptions to the project’s flow. Grouping assignments based on their importance and urgency means that, when you encounter setbacks such as late delivery of raw materials, or absent team members, you can quite easily reallocate resources to the most consequential tasks to limit any interruption to the project’s overall progress. To help you prioritise your assignments, you can label them using the following categories:
not important or urgent;
not important but urgent;
important but not urgent;
important and urgent.
Important and urgent tasks are, obviously, the ones to keep the closest eye on.
Delegating tasks
Delegate tasks to team members based on their strengths. When employees focus on tasks that match their expertise, they’re likely to finish them faster and more efficiently. Delegation can also help you find time to handle more important issues, such as budgeting and resource allocation.
Focusing on one task at a time
Directing all your energy towards one task at a time can enhance your productivity. You can do this by time-blocking your day – a strategy which involves allocating specific blocks of time for handling distinct assignments.
Identifying your productive time
You can complete more tasks in a shorter duration by leveraging your peak time. Identify when you have the most energy, and work the best, and use that time to handle your high-priority tasks..
Taking occasional breaks
Be sure to allocate time for breaks to help you recuperate mentally. Breaks can assist you in reducing exhaustion and boredom that might affect your productivity; they can also give you time to review your progress and look at tasks from a different perspective.
Knowing your limits
When planning your time it’s important to only commit to tasks you can deliver on schedule. Knowing your limits might sometimes involve telling your supervisor to allocate assignments to others because you already have several tasks on the go. It can also help you to ask for postponements early enough to prevent abrupt disruptions to the workflow.
Automating recurrent assignments
You can save time by automating recurring tasks that follow the same steps. For instance, creating an automatic thank you email can help you avoid writing new emails to thank your team members at the end of every week. Another example is using templates instead of writing new invoices or budgets that follow the same format.
Assigning similar tasks to one individual
Combining similar assignments and giving them to one person can help you save time. This strategy can eliminate the time needed to switch between tasks and the need for re-orientation after every assignment.
Reviewing your workdays
At the end of your workday, assess the day’s successes by highlighting what went well and identifying areas that need adjustments. If you have incomplete tasks, add them to the next day’s plan. You can also review why you might not have met the day’s goals and think about ways to improve in the future.
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