5+ Time Management Activities to Practice at Your Workplace

Have you ever tried implementing time management activities at your workplace?

In today’s increasingly competitive and busy workplace environment, the phrase effective time management may strike one as rather fanciful. Owing to our incredibly fast-paced lives, many employees find difficult to manage their time effectively.

Count in the avalanche of texts, emails, notifications, shoulder-taps, instant messages, and frequent meetings, you are lucky enough to experience a few precious minutes of uninterrupted focus time.

Fortunately, with a couple of tips and these great time management activities, you could take back your schedule.

List of The Best Time Management Activities

Here’s a list of few time management activities that you can implement at your workplace:

1. Identify Redundant Activities

This is a simple time management activity. All you have to do is take out a piece of paper and jot down every non-priority or time-wasting activity that you partake in:

Smoke breaks
Coffee breaks
Personal phone calls
Watching TV
Napping
Surfing the web

Once you’ve compiled a list, estimate the number of hours or minutes you spend each week or day on each activity. Then make a chart preferably on a separate piece of paper which lists all activities that you wrote down on the first sheet. This chart should have rows and columns for each day of the week to help you keep track of your activities.

Fold this chart and pack it in your wallet, using it to keep track of the number of hours or minutes you spend on each activity per day. Continue doing this for about a week and compare it with the original sheet. You’ll be surprised to know how much time you dedicate to excess or non-priority activities.

PS. Check out this list of soft skills that’ll come in handy at your workplace.

2. Productivity Rhythms

Ask each employee to write down each hour of the day from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep. Then ask these employees to think of a standard day off from their work for the purpose of this exercise. This will help them understand and appreciate their natural energy cycle outside of work.

Then in hourly increments, ask them to accurately label the way each hour really feels to them: vibrant, on fire, cruise control, distracted, at 70%, slowing down, hungry and tired etc.

This will help employees fully understand their natural rhythms. Ideally, employees should be working when they’re feeling most vibrant, energetic and on fire. However, in order to do this, they must take out time for themselves whenever they are distracted, tired or slowing down.

But this activity doesn’t end here. Ask your employees to compare their rhythms with each other. This demonstrates how each person has their own unique productivity cadences whilst encouraging empathy, creating a better understanding among each other. In the long run, this can promote work motivation.

3. Ribbon Cutting

This is a very popular time management activity. Gather your co-workers and present to them an ordinary ribbon that is a hundred centimetres in length. Keeping in mind that each centimetre in the ribbon represents a year, cut the ribbon until its length equals the average lifespan.

Now, trim away the average age of the group to represent the group’s remaining time in that lifespan. Continue to cut this ribbon for a variety of things such as sleep, family time, and other non-work obligations.

You will have a short ribbon left at the end of this time management activity. Use this to emphasize on how limited time should be used productively.

4. Mayo Jar

You will require an empty jar along with a variety of medium and large-sized rocks. Each employee must fill this jar using the rocks to the best of their ability. Great time management activities such as this one can help employees see prioritizing tasks as a hands-on process.

Keep in mind that the larger rocks represent essential or more important tasks; hence it is vital to get them in the jar first. Make sure you help them make this important connection as well as relate it to their work.

5. Disconnect from the Digital World

It goes without saying that some of the major sources of distraction are often the very tools and gadgets we tend to use to keep track of work: phones, computers, tablets, laptops and other digital devices. The Internet, as you can imagine, is a rabbit hole, and research could easily turn into a Wonderland-like diversion within a matter of seconds.

So, try to put your cell phone away, on silent and out of sight. In case you are a tab-hoarder, try to open only what you really need and disconnect from the excess. There are even various apps and plugins which will block specific sites for you during certain times of the day.

6. Automate Mundane Activities

You could be the most efficient person in your organization but none of that would help if you’re still bogged down by inefficient or poor processes.

A number of tasks such as updating employee information or approving time-off requests tend to take up several hours of one’s days. Because of this, there is not much that employees can do to keep their head above the flood of never-ending paperwork because they have no other choice.

However, the fact is a majority of daily or routine tasks can easily be automated as well as optimized using appropriate tools. Encourage your employees to use appropriate tools to streamline work processes. For starters, here’s a list of some killer time management tools that’ll save you plenty of time.