Lovepreet Dhaliwal January 7, 2021 Raise your hand if you find difficulty in managing your time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Don’t you think the line between the office, home, and our kids does not exist at all since when we have started working from home? Managing time is tricky, even under normal circumstances. Still, we are now working under entirely new parameters, so I can imagine how difficult it is for everyone to do so.
Undoubtedly, COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the way we manage our personal and professional lives. Being able to accommodate these changes will ensure that our team can maintain effective time management skills.
Here I am sharing a few key tips for time management that will help our teams to be more effective while working remotely.
1. Plan Ahead to Manage Time:
In the starting few weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, most of us had to embrace a ‘take this day-by-day’ mentality. But now, when we know that things will not be going back to normal in the short term, it is important to plan your work routine as much as you can. Avoid scheduling so many meetings in a day because this will lead your team to use fragmented time inefficiently. Manage your schedule for meetings that align with your energy windows. Managers can take some time to hear everyone out and plan accordingly.
2. Schedule Your Breaks:
Working from home can feel like we need to be ‘on’ all the time and available to colleagues because they can’t see us in person. But working from home all the time at present is not good. It will affect your mental and physical health. To avoid this, take regular screen breaks and a lunch break to manage your stress levels. Taking coffee or tea breaks will help you to boost your productivity. And also, keep a workout slot in your routine to exercise.
3. Use Technology to Help Keep You Accountable:
A reliable technology is an imperative item while working from home. To manage your work from home, employees can use time tracking and recruitment analytics solutions. Time tracking software will help you manage your time, like how long it takes you to complete your tasks. At the same time, a recruitment analytics solution will help recruiters to avoid manual screening of resumes. The tools like a resume parser can parse a large number of resumes or jobs in a scalable manner. The resume parser allows you to extract the candidate information from resumes in pre-defined data fields. Together with these technologies, you can allow yourself to create more realistic and accurate schedules.
4. Proactively Manage Your Calendar Daily:
Instead of leaving your calendar blank or open slate for others to populate, set your time in those slots for your tasks. Because people often select meeting slots according to their time. Every Friday or Monday, spend time plotting chunks of focused time in advance to meet the demand of projects, campaigns, or any other responsibilities you are managing.
5. Be Transparent While Communicating:
This is one of the most helpful time management strategies used while working from home. Especially during this uncertainty when direct human to human communication is missing. Feelings of isolation is a common scenario. So, be aware of the different tools that help you talk to your friends and relatives. Managers and employees can use tools like Zoom, Slack, and Hangouts that will help you create virtual spaces that facilitate idea exchanges, bonding, and socialization to keep you and your team connected.
6. Set Boundaries that Work for You:
While working remotely, we must manage our time accordingly to get productive results. There are many factors which we should consider and set boundaries between our personal and professional lives. Working remotely requires discipline, time management, structure, and creating a routine for yourself. Managers can encourage their teams to devise their schedules to complete the project when feeling most productive and collaborative.
The most valuable resource is time. Spending time on things that don’t matter will only increase our stress level. Nowadays, time management has become more than just a tool to improve productivity.
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