Time management is a practice preached by throngs of professionals who struggle against daily deadlines, and is a prerequisite for excelling at your job. When put into place, this skill enables you to be more productive than ever before.

By Nabilah Husna A. Rahman

The emails keep coming in and your workload is piling right before your bewildered and glassy eyes. In the corner of the room, you can see a tic going off in your manager’s cheek – it’s the umpteenth time you’ve missed an urgent deadline.

When you notice that your work area is papered with Post-its, to-do lists and notices of personal deadlines that you never seem to meet, it’s time to acknowledge the problem – your time management skills aren’t the best they can be.

Stretching your time is quite unlike stretching a dollar. The former is a resource you simply can’t save and utilise on another day. Instead, you have an average of eight (or for some, perhaps ten) hours in your office to do as much as possible. Your power lies in having superiority over the unyielding clock hands, rather than letting time drag you by the navel in your hastening attempts at completing your work.

You might argue that despite your seemingly prodigious list-making and planning skills, you’re still running far behind deadlines in the hopes of catching up through slipshod, shortcut-ridden work. Fortunately, there is little more than several rules of thumb – which can easily be learnt and adopted into your working style – to successfully manage your time.

Plan your schedule
One cannot underestimate the sheer power of impeccable organisation skills. While the modern aphorism of “creativity is messy” may apply to the occasional street graffiti artist, an office job requires proper and meticulous planning of schedules. If you’ve been writing up lists of work to be done, great – you’re on the right track. Make sure you include everything that has yet to be done, even the seemingly breezy task of coming up with ideas for a marketing pitch. Now, prioritise that list.

Prioritise your tasks
Although it’s politically correct to declare that everything is equally important, you must know what ought to be done first. The level of urgency depends on factors like internal company deadlines or a client’s relentless demands. Once you tackle these high-priority tasks, get down to the nitty-gritty. At the very least, once you’ve completed them, your heart won’t skip a beat if another pressing job is assigned.

Dispense quality work
There is little point in completing an assignment ahead of time if it is beggared of quality. By reasonable standards, deadlines are usually set to afford you enough time to ensure your end-product has purposeful value. Instead of submitting a bad draft of a write-up or an irrelevant research paper, allocate time for making necessary amendments. Don’t be too much of a perfectionist though – spending more time than necessary on one task will only wear you out and bring you back to square one.

Take advantage of time-gaps
While you’re in that snaking queue at the bank or waiting for a meeting to start, complete the small tasks of replying to quick emails, or even mentally brainstorm with yourself on ideas for a creative task. Seize every pocket of free time you’re presented with. They’re probably the Office Gods’ way of telling you that you’re doing a good job – “Here’s some bonus time!”

Divide your workload
No man is an island, and no office functions with you and you alone. The corporate web isn’t an innately selfish one, so don’t be afraid to ask for help if need be. When tasked with a major project that seems impossible to complete alone, divide it amongst one or two colleagues in your department, and give credit where credit is due. You may be the most qualified staff (or so you think) but no one is the best at everything. Expertise is an imperative you can hardly forgo. Besides, the support of a team will evaporate at least a small percentage of the initial strain.

Keep a journal
Strokes of brilliance often materialise in our heads in the middle of the most unsuspecting situations. This is especially true for individuals in creative industries, where the bustle of work leaves little time for uninterrupted cerebral sessions when you can just sit down to think. Bring a journal out with you everywhere you go or a portable gadget to type in your ideas before you forget them. By the time you head back to the office to work on these brainwaves, what started out as ill-formed notions may evolve into full-blown proposals that will put your name in your manager’s good books.

Take a break
Unless you’ve been trained from the age of three to only power down after dusk, then a break would be your best bet when you face a major mental roadblock. As subjective as the term “break” can be, staring blankly at your computer screen for hours on end is unlikely to get you anywhere. Instead, take a walk outside, grab something from the pantry, or even take an extra long toilet break – anything that gets you away from the overwhelming mental obstruction you’re facing. And before you know it, you will be raring to go again.