Helping your team use their working time better raises the output of the whole group. But not everyone has good time management skills, or knows how to arrange their work sensibly.
Everyone gets the same 8 hours a day, and yet the amount of work each person gets through varies enormously. Part of that is capability, but a big part of it is time management. So how do you get the results without asking people to work overtime?
As a manager, helping your team build those skills is one of the more important parts of the job. Here are the methods that work.
1. Plan everything, including the small things
One of the most effective habits is planning each day with specific times attached. Every activity that needs doing, even the small ones: sending email, writing a status update, meeting a client. A lot of small tasks add up to a lot of hours. So write them down to see the full picture, and then arrange the time sensibly around them.
Writing down what has to be handled today and noting the status also gives people a way to review what happened when they need to.
If someone needs a way to categorise their work, the Eisenhower matrix is a good tool. Instead of trying to handle everything, sort the work into four groups and treat each one differently:
- Do immediately: urgent and important
- Schedule: important but not urgent
- Delegate: urgent but not important
- Drop: neither urgent nor important
In practice, people who do not track and plan their work concretely waste a lot of time. Writing things down and planning is the foundation everything else sits on.
2. Break work into pieces and focus hard
Having too much to do makes it hard to know where to start, and that alone burns a lot of time. The advice for your team is to split work into smaller pieces, complete one at a time, and focus as hard as they can while doing it.
The Pomodoro technique is a good way to build that focus. The principle is to break big work into small parts and handle each within a fixed window:
- Step 1: pick the task
- Step 2: break it into parts, and set a timer for each part, typically 25 minutes
- Step 3: finish that part within the 25 minutes
- Step 4: take a 5 minute break before starting the next part
- Step 5: after 4 short breaks, take a longer one of 15 to 30 minutes
Pomodoro works for managers too. If you have too much on your plate, do not panic. Break it down and focus on one piece at a time, and the anxiety usually resolves itself within an hour.
3. Set limits on your own working time
A lot of people admit they regularly deal with email after hours. That eats into the time they should be resting or learning, and sometimes it signals a lack of professionalism to whoever receives the message.
Recent research also shows that people who consistently work outside their hours are at higher risk of burnout and report feeling stressed more often. Sustained, that reduces both individual and team output.
To avoid it, everyone should set their own limits around work. Build the habit of focusing hard and using the working day well, but once the day ends, put the work down and rest. Keeping that boundary pushes back exhaustion and improves results.
Helping your team use their time well is not a side project. It is part of the long term strategy of the business, and it needs the company to actively support people in getting there.
