How To Manage Your Schedule To Improve Your Work Efficiency

Have you ever wondered why it’s always impossible to get any job done at work? You have a long list of activities to do but have no idea how the whole day went and you couldn’t do anything. After hearing people’s experiences, you’re confident that it’s possible to achieve warp-speed productivity every day. But, how does it happen?  

The fact is managing your schedule is not easy when about 75% of the time in some work environment, there are never-ending distractions, interruptions, and telephone calls. And as you know, time is money, it runs inexorably. What you want is an efficient way to plan your day for maximum productivity and find scheduling methods that work best for you.  Time spent in management directly affects the attainment of a company’s goals, hence its relevance in the economic and commercial sphere.

So your job at work is to optimize your resources to get the most out of time for the productivity of the company. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand how to manage your schedule to better your work efficiency.

Prioritize Your Tasks

We all have particular strengths and weaknesses when it comes to time management and productivity, what works for one person could be a total disaster for another. However, one method that would work for everyone is prioritizing their tasks.

It is always important to set your priorities in order of importance because you can’t do everything at the same time and equally don’t have enough time to do all that’s needed to be done. To effectively manage your activities, divide them into four categories:

• Important and highly urgent: They are tasks that need to be done right away; you don’t shift them to the next day.
• Important and less urgent: These are tasks that only appear important but can be done at a later date. They are not to be completed before the first category.
• Urgent but not important: These are tasks that need to be done as soon as possible but when completed, they don’t have any lasting value. 
• Not important and not urgent: These tasks are usually leisure activities. They can be done at any time after the first category.

Categorizing your tasks this way will give you a better view of how to deal with them first before considering the other methods.

Learn How To Delegate

If your goal is to do more in less time you should learn how to assign work to others. Since you can’t prolong time or get more hours in a day, delegating would help you use your time wisely and do more. 

Delegating means letting someone else take the lead on your responsibilities and trust the outcome would be one that sits well with you. Depending on the responsibilities you are dealing with, you can liaise with your firm to create an enterprise legal management solution that can solve real-life problems for you and other employees. This will invariably boost the company’s productivity and workers can build a workflow that matches their exact needs.

Take Regular Breaks

Working long hours without breaks can affect your productivity and ability to focus. Mistakes are prone to happen when you’re tired and stressed out. This can cause a steady decline in your overall productivity. Observing short breaks when working would help you maintain a constant level of performance.  

For a straight eight-hour shift, you should take breaks for 30 uninterrupted minutes and two additional 15-minutes. It would be longer if the shifts are also longer. Taking breaks would help improve performance and cut down on workplace accidents.

Quit Multitasking 

Most people think that the ability to multitask is an important skill for increasing efficiency, but that isn’t entirely true.

Studies have found that attempting to do several tasks at once can result in lost time and low productivity. Instead, make a habit of committing to a single task before moving on to your next project.

Turn Off Notifications

Every time you switch from any form of activity to check your notifications and back, you are already multitasking. In other words, you’ve lost concentration.

It’s really hard to resist the temptation of checking an email that just popped up, voicemail, text notification, or social media notification. That doesn’t mean it is impossible. During work hours, remember to turn off your notifications. This makes you more proactive and productive rather than just reacting.

Obey The 2-minute Rule

To make the most of the little time available for you to work, it is recommended that implement this rule. The idea is this: if you have a task hand that can be done in two minutes or less, do it immediately. Completing the task right away takes less time than having to get back to it later. Simply put, don’t procrastinate on simple tasks.

Have you been exhausted or had unproductive hours? That’s because you are finding it difficult to manage your work schedule. Do that and you’d get to work smoothly. Follow the methods mentioned above to help you manage your schedule and increase work efficiency.