Effective time management skills help you complete work, improve focus, and make better decisions. This, in turn, will help you organize each day better — to avoid confusion, reduce stress, and give yourself space to be creative and proactive.
Ultimately, by practicing time management and organizational skills, you can accomplish critical goals and advance in your career.
In this article, we’ll cover eight types of time management and organizational skills, their importance, and five smart tips to help you improve your skills.
As a bonus, we’ll highlight some essential resume-worthy time management and organizational skills you can pick up today.
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8 types of time management and organizational skills
Here’s a detailed look at eight types of time management and organizational skills:
1. Organizing
Whether it’s an up-to-date calendar, saving documents with a proper name, or having a tidy workspace, organizing can help maintain a clear picture of what you need to complete and when.
Here are two ways to organize things:
A. Mental organization
Mental organizational skills allow you to research, analyze situations, and think strategically. You can use your analytical skills to adopt a systematic approach to problem-solving.
Some essential mental organizational skills include attention to detail, decision-making, creative thinking, and more.
B. Physical organization
While most work happens virtually today, doing something as small as organizing your work desk can help you avoid distractions and improve focus.
Filing, office management, record keeping are some examples of physical organizational skills.
2. Prioritization
Prioritization helps you complete the most important task in an order that can help you be productive and efficient.
When assigning priority to your tasks, you can consider factors like:
- When each task needs to be done.
- How long it might take to complete.
- How crucial it might be to others in the organization.
- What could happen if the task is not done.
- Whether any other task might be interrupted in the process.
3. Goal-setting
Goal setting allows you to clearly understand your end goal and what exactly you need to do to accomplish it.
Once you have a clear goal in your mind, you can work towards it with complete focus. You can also identify the important tasks required to accomplish the goal and avoid wasting time on unimportant ones.
4. Communication and collaboration
Strong communication skills let you make your plans and goals clear to your coworkers. This allows them to see the bigger picture and understand how their efforts affect the end goal.
Communicating clearly also helps you delegate your tasks, which lets you focus on completing the most important task first.
Additionally, your success may depend on your ability to collaborate with others. Being open to new ideas, feedback, and advice is just as crucial for successful collaboration as meeting targets.
5. Task management
Creating task lists is a great way to note down everything you need and avoid forgetting anything important. They are also a great way to avoid spending all day thinking about what you need to do next.
Moreover, you can use project management tools to keep track of your tasks and projects and monitor how they’re progressing.
6. Workload management
Working long hours or skipping breaks can sometimes improve productivity in the short term. But once your exhaustion catches up, your overall productivity drops.
Knowing and enforcing an optimum workload for yourself and your team ensures consistency in performance and avoids employee burnout.
7. Delegation
Some people resist delegating because they want to maintain control or due to monetary constraints. Either way, both approaches can ultimately lower productivity and raise costs.
Delegation allows more work to be completed faster. Through delegation, you can identify what you can do and delegate the rest. After all, it’s better to succeed at a few tasks than to attempt and fail at many.
8. Stress management
Keeping stress levels in check is a huge part of time management.
Why?
Compounding stress can lead to long-term mental health issues that can further lead to bad time management.
Here are a few ways to manage stress:
- Include small breaks throughout your day.
- Reward yourself as you accomplish tasks.
- Do some physical activities like running or swimming.
- Get out in the sunlight.
- Try relaxation techniques like meditation and deep breathing.
Why are time management and organizational skills important?
Let’s take a look at the benefits of practicing time management and organizational skills:
1. Helps save time
Effective time management improves your ability to focus. You will be able to complete your task list in less time and have more hours to relax – creating an excellent work-life balance.
Moreover, good organizational skills can help you avoid searching through piles of paperwork or an unnamed folder on your computer to find important documents. This can save time — which you can spend on more important tasks.
2. Improves efficiency
Any time management skill teaches you to take control of your own time.
You also learn to focus better on your tasks and complete them in less time, resulting in enhanced efficiency.
Additionally, proper organization skills ensure that you have all the necessary information and resources to complete the task. This lets you avoid last-minute scrambling and instead focus on quality.
Consequently, avoiding these last-minute tasks not only helps deliver work on time but significantly increases your productivity and decreases your stress level.
3. Greater reliability and less stress
Working in an organized workplace can make you feel focused and stress-free.
You won’t be running around looking for information, sorting through unorganized paperwork, or dealing with the consequences of someone else’s poor time management abilities.
Conversely, when you manage your time well, your team members are likely to develop a sense of reliability. They know that you do your work diligently, don’t give in to procrastination, and hence they can trust you.
4. Better work quality
With good time management skills, you can quickly prioritize your work and allow enough time to tasks based on their complexity.
As a result, you’re able to focus on that specific task and deliver work with fewer errors. Moreover, if it’s a challenging task, you’ll have enough time in hand to resolve it and provide results of the expected quality.
5. Leaves a good impression
Whether it’s a company’s decision-makers or an employee, their values and work ethic directly influence company culture and profitability.
When an individual learns to manage time, they’ll be able to complete their own work and meet project deadlines – quickly achieving their daily goals.
This way, they leave a good impression on their seniors and colleagues and set an example for them to follow.
To help you get the most out of time management and organization, let’s look at some sure-fire tips to hone your skills.
5 smart tips to improve time management and organizational skills
Here are five simple tips to improve your time management and organizational skills:
1. Prioritize your tasks
Making to-do lists can help you physically prioritize your tasks. You can also understand the upcoming due dates or how the task affects others to get certain things done first.
But you can also use various time management techniques and strategies to prioritize your tasks. Here are three simple methods:
A. Urgent Vs. important
Urgent tasks require your immediate attention.
However, just because a task is urgent doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important.
Completing urgent tasks of little significance can cost you a lot of time. That’s why you should also figure out the importance of your urgent tasks.
How do you do that?
You can use the Eisenhower matrix given below to keep your tasks organized:
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | Do Do these tasks right away. |
Decide Decide when to do these tasks. |
| Not Important | Delegate Delegate if possible. |
Delete Set these aside to do later or eliminate them. |
This simple matrix can help you visualize your tasks. You can then consider the long-term outcome of these tasks and focus on those that will make you not only productive but efficient.
B. The ABC method
The ABC Method involves assigning a priority status of A, B, or C to each of the items on your task list.
- A Status Items (Must Do): This consists of high-priority tasks or those that have urgent deadlines.
- B Status Items (Should Do): This consists of tasks that can be quite important over time.
- C Status Items (Nice to Do): This consists of low-priority tasks that can have few negative consequences if left incomplete at the moment.
C. Getting things done
Consider the following while making your task list:
- What can I do where I am?: Sometimes, we have unexpected pockets of time. Think about where you are, what you can do, and how to use it to benefit.
- How much time do I have?: Be realistic about what can be done in the time you have available.
- How much energy and focus do I have?: What can you realistically take on right now?
- What has the highest payoff for me if I do it?: Another way to assess importance, weight, or priorities.
2. Follow a schedule
When you know what you need to do, you can quickly complete those tasks.
You can use the first 30 minutes of your day to create a to-do list that aligns with your weekly plans.
However, remember to be flexible with your plans and account for unexpected tasks.
You can then revisit your task list at the end of the day to see which task or activity took longer to complete and identify any issues you might be facing at work.
Additionally, you consider blocking off specific brackets of time on your schedule, so you are guaranteed to have time in your schedule without distraction or meetings.
3. Set short and long-term goals
Goal-setting can help you clearly understand what you want to achieve.
To achieve a long-term goal, you need to identify smaller tasks and set goals along the way.
For example, if you’ve set a long-term goal to take on more job responsibility, you need to set smaller goals like improving certain skills.
However, more importantly, you should set SMART goals, i.e., your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based. These parameters will help you set realistic goals and avoid demotivating situations that can arise due to unmet targets.
4. Use appropriate tools
Sure, all these tips can help you with time management and organization, but you need the right tools and apps to help you follow them.
Here are three types of tools to help you make the most of your skills:
A. Online calendars
Online calendars are an excellent tool for time management.
Use it to:
- Manage your project schedule.
- Create time blocks.
- Mark important dates and events.
- Set up reminders, etc.
You can pick online calendars like Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc.
B. Project management tools
Whether you’re a project manager or an employee, project management tools are a must to track work progress.
A project management tool can help you:
- Track project progress in real-time.
- Keep your workflow organized.
- Perform workload distribution for optimal time management.
You can use tools like Trello, Basecamp, Asana, and more.
C. Time management tool
A time management tool can help you record your work hours, get auto-generated timesheets, and have measurable data to maximize productivity.
You can:
- See the start and end times of each task.
- Get direct reports on productivity broken down by day, week, or month.
- Determine the total amount of time spent on projects and tasks.
- View the top projects and tasks based on hours worked.
Time Doctor is one such time tracking and employee productivity management tool. It’s used by SMBs like Thrive Market and large companies like RE/MAX to boost productivity.
Time Doctor tracks all workday activities, giving you real-time, actionable insights to improve your time management and productivity.
Explore all the useful features this tool provides.
5. Set a time limit
While creating your schedule, you should also set time limits for each task.
This can help:
- Improve focus and efficiency.
- Identify the tasks that take a lot of time or more than expected.
- Analyze your workflow and eliminate time wasters, like unscheduled breaks.
- Avoid any last-minute rush, ensuring you complete tasks on time.
Leverage these time management skills to boost your profile. Learn how you can do this in the next section.
10 resume-worthy time management and organizational skills
An individual with excellent time management skills can adapt to new problems and readjust as needed to complete a task.
And traits like planning, scheduling, strategy, delegation, and adaptability make an employee dependable, and employers look out for that.
Here are some time management and organizational skills you can put on your resume:
- Creating and keeping deadlines.
- Delegation.
- Goal setting.
- Decision making.
- Managing appointments.
- Team management.
- Project management.
- Team leadership.
- Strategic thinking and implementation.
- Conflict resolution.
Wrapping up
Good time management and organization is an essential soft skill. It ensures timely delivery of quality work, preventing stress and work conflicts.
You can check out the tips mentioned here and implement them to hone your skills.
Once done, you’ll be able to master time management and boost your productivity through the roof!
Vaishali Badgujar is a Content and SEO specialist at Time Doctor, an employee-friendly time-tracking system that boosts productivity.