Finance professionals tackle a variety of tasks each and every day. So time management can be a real challenge.
One of the best ways to avoid time-management issues is to understand the areas that give people the biggest problems to begin with.
To that end, here are the issues giving employees the most problems, based on a recent Toggl study:
- failure to set priorities (20%)
- poor planning (17%)
- allowing distractions (13%)
- underestimating the effort a task will take (13%), and
- not keeping track of time (10%).
3 best practices
Of course, being aware of time-management issues is only part of the solution. Toggl recommends the following tips to help your people better manage their time:
- Estimate and check. Give your best approximation as to how long each of your tasks takes, then track how long it actually does. Do this for a full week.
- Compare and adjust. Take your estimates and compare them to the time you actually spent on each task and revise your to-do list.
- Leave room. Never schedule yourself 100%. There should always be room for priority projects that come up at the last minute.
It’s also important to leave some free time in your schedule for handling distractions.
After all, you never know when an employee is going to come to you with a question that needs to be answered ASAP.
