Orangescrum Learning Series: #7 Why it’s Time you Track Time

Whether its personal life or business or project management, time management comes first in our mind.

Most of us sometimes feel we have too much work to do but not enough time to accomplish all the tasks.

We blame lack of time for our poor finances, stress and poor relationships etc. This is due to our failure of Time Management.

The company or Project Manager can miss the timeline for the project, fail to publish the magazine if the editorial is not ready, you may miss clients appointments & so on.

The consequences are serious as we may face financial loss/penalty or job loss which will lead to a stressful life.

That’s why it is so important to manage TIME efficiently and make the most of it.

“Fewer than a third of all projects were successfully completed on time and on budget over the past year” as per Capterra.

Time can’t wait for you nor can you save it for later.

“Time is Money”, this explains it all!

In business, unmanaged & unbilled time is loss of revenue. Wise and effective time management is the need of the hour in this digital & competitive world.

The real question is how you can manage your time effectively? There are tons of article written over it.

But nobody tells how can you know whether you’ve utilized your time effectively or not at your workplace or daily life.

Let’s discuss why you’re failing at Time Management at your workplace first. These are few reasons we found:

No TO DO List

Are you frequently reminded of an important task at the end of the day?

If so, then you’re probably not using a To-Do list; if you do, then most probably you’re not selecting your priorities effectively.

The reason to use a To DO list is to plan your tasks for effective accomplishment.

Not Prioritizing

You’re in the middle of a brainstorming session for your marketing strategy& come up with an idea for better marketing campaign; at that moment your client calls for a meeting.

Later you completely forget about the idea.

It is very hard to prioritize tasks in these scenarios, but you have to learn & manage for effective time management.

This is where a To DO List & prioritization of tasks help.

Procrastination

This happens to many of us at work!  We feel we should focus on a particular task whereas we’re working on another task.

And at times, we keep on putting off a task completion which seem minor and then become a beast to be dealt with on top priority.

In that case, you need to break large projects/tasks down into smaller tasks, so that it’s easy to see everything that you need to get done, and focus on one task at a time. Doing this you can overcome this problem.

Taking on too Much

Your colleagues want your help & it is hard to tell “no” to them.

That means you’re involved in many projects and commitments which can lead to poor performance and failure of projects on time.

In that process, you may rush to finish your own tasks with a dip in quality and productivity.

If that product or module delivers to clients, then you’re bound to get bugs, negative feedback & most importantly a negative reputation/impression about you.

To manage this, learn the art of saying “yes” to the person, but “no” to the task.

Multitasking

To get out of workload, few think multitasking is the best way to deal with it.

Like while we’re on a call with a client, we try to reply emails of other customers.

Actually that task takes 20-40 percent more time compared to completing the same list of tasks in sequence.

Also there is a greater chance of error and the client on the phone may be frustrated due to lack of concentration.

So, it is better to focus on one task at a time. That way, you’ll produce higher quality work. You can save multitasking for later when you have really managed to control your TO DO list.

Ineffectively Scheduling Tasks

Every person has different ways of scheduling Tasks. Some people think early morning is their pick up time & some feels evening is the perfect time when we feel most productive & energetic.

You can make best use of your time by scheduling high-value work during your peak time, and low-energy work (like returning phone calls and checking email), during your “down” time.

Also there are many other reasons of failures, but the most important point is how you will know you’re effectively managing your time or not?

Don’t worry; Orangescrum will do the rest for you.

You can create a To Do List and set priorities in Orangescrum as we mentioned in our previous Learning series.

When you start working on a task, you can use our smart intuitive Timer to track the time spent for a task. As the task finish, you need to save the time tracked by the timer.

Businesses identified “capturing time/costs against projects” as their biggest project management challenge.(Source: Capterra)

In other way, you can manually enter your time after completing the job from your list.

From the Time Log or Resource Utilization (how a resource is utilized) report, it will tell you how effectively you or your team managed time.

Time Management will not only help you at workplace but it is the key to your career success and personal life goal.

The benefits are immense:

• You can accomplish more with less effort
• Improve your decision making ability
• Career Success
• Reduce Stress
• Increases revenue

Start Time TrackingTime & Resource Management

Over to you

There are many things you can do by managing your time effectively. We waste a lot of time which we can put to better uses. Following the above points you can do so, even using tools like Orangescrum will effectively increase your productivity & time management.

Let us know on which way you manage your time & how you measure it? We use Orangescrum extensively for this. We eager to know your comments!
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