5 Important Time Management Strategies for Employees

If we were able to put a tiny, automated on/off switch inside every employee's head, and run checks on how many hours of the day they are focusing on work for, the results would probably astonish both employers and employees! Even if Facebook is blocked from work computers, there are high levels of supervision and employees must leave their phones somewhere away from their workstation, there is plenty of unproductive time at work … and most businesses don't have anything close to this strictly controlled atmosphere. Nor would they want to! Today we are looking at simple, proactive solutions to the productivity dilemma (including telephone time clocking), plugging some obvious holes so that brain breaks are no longer company-killers.

Activity logs

These are as close as we can get to having that magical automated on/off switch inside the brain. Logging the amount of time spent on each activity, not just for the entire day at work, helps identify slow spots and difficulties. When we have to write down how much time was spent on something, we are much more accountable for it. Manual systems can work well, but automated systems, like a micro-version of telephone time clocking, are the ideal solution.

Telephone Time Clocking

According to rounding rules at both federal and state levels, rounding might be permitting your employees to be paid for up to fifteen minutes a day when they aren’t even on the work premises. Implement systems like telephone time clocking to plug this obvious productivity hole.

Prioritization

Effective managers use this tool all the time -- get the most important thing done first. If your employees don't have all the information necessary to decide what tasks on their list are the most important, managers should be helping them decide. This can be done at weekly, daily or monthly meetings.

Managing Interruptions

Interruptions can be even more devastating to a company budget than manual time cards and their daily fifteen minute inaccuracies. We havetelephone time clocking as a set process to manage the signing in dilemma -- but no set rule for dealing with interruptions. It simply has to become a part of company culture that employees interrupt each other as little as possible. Questions can be left at a central spot rather than asked as they come up, for example.