4 Ways to improve your team time management
“A successful Team Time Management is your ladder to a successful business.”
The bigger your team are, the more you need to ensure optimum use of time to prevent time waste. Proper time management is the key to prevent time wasted in doing just one task. You need a set of skills and responsible allocation of resources to prevent mistakes in time management (ex. setting vague goals, failing to declare and prepare the schedules, lack of planning, and lack of prioritization). So losing time also means losing the money in many ways in business. Below are the ways of improving your team time management.
1. Adopt The Pomodoro Time Management
Optimising time is the single most important thing, especially for a small business. You need to be able to optimise small team first before you can optimise a bigger, more complex team. The first way to optimise your time is by not doing everything at the same time. Instead, try to block out a specific time to accomplish a specific task. This is called the Pomodoro time management. Pomodoro time management encourages people to work with the time they have, not against it.
By adopting this time management technique, you will break your working time into each of twenty-five minutes and in between, there are five minutes break. These intervals are called Pomodoros. After four Pomodoros, you’re allowed to take a longer break from fifteen to twenty minutes. For example, when you have a job to write an article, you can devote yourself to twenty-five minutes in writing without any distraction. After all, you only have twenty-five minutes. Then you’ll get a reward (five-minute break!) before you continue another session.
2. Make Your Meeting Effective
We always need to talk and collaborate with our team colleagues in the form of a meeting. Try to do a speedy meeting where you block maximum time for a meeting. You or anyone in your team can discuss the details after meeting. Try this for an effective meeting:
- Give everyone a block of time to talk rather than letting the conversation wanders without purpose.
- Let everyone knows the meeting point so they can prepare themselves first.
- Be concise and clear of what you want to say. Keep it short and simple.
- Save time as best as you can. Five minutes wasted time in a room of ten people means wasting fifty minutes of total time.
3. Prioritize Important Tasks
You can only accomplish so much each day, so you need to prioritize. List the most to the least important thing to do and start from the top. When setting your priority, you need to analyze the urgency of each task by considering some factors, such as:
- When is the deadline of each task?
- How long it might take to finish a task?
- How important the task might be to others in the organization?
- What could happen if the task is not done on time?
- Will any task might be interrupted by troubles in the process?
4. Take The Advantage of Time-Zone
If your team consist of freelancers in a different timezone, use it as your leverage to get more things accomplished in 24 hours. A different time zone means different working hours. If you can plan the task in the most detail possible, you will finish a lot of tasks in a day. According to Scott Berkun in his book The Year Without Pants, even Microsoft's Internet Explorer team found success planning work around time shifts. They named the time shifts system as “Follow the Sun” that use the time difference between the team in the U.S. and India. When it’s night in the U.S., India is having the daytime and work on unfinished or other tasks. Ben Hanna, the designer of Couchsurfing, in his blog also make a statement on the best thing about this strategy, he said "Good timing can make a project literally zip around the globe with work being completed 24 hours a day."
Conclusion
Team time management will help you a lot to run your business better. It will also minimize the conflict within your team because everything is organized properly. The more important thing, team time management will make you and your team more productive. Productivity and organized things are pathways to a successful business. So, the success in team time management means you can say hello to success in your business.
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References:
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/time-management-skills-2063776
https://www.nytimes.com/guides/business/how-to-run-an-effective-meeting
https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/remote-work-time-shift/
https://www.timecamp.com/blog/2018/06/improve-time-management-for-your-team/