Employee time management is crucial to running a successful business. It allows teams to monitor how much time is spent on tasks and projects and make adjustments to improve efficiency. However, employee time management is not as easy as it sounds. For instance, when you think of time management, you likely picture boring spreadsheets. Automated timesheets can help you achieve your goals without the tediousness of manual tracking. This article will offer insights to help you improve your employee time management skills so you can boost productivity and performance with automated timesheets.
TimeTackle’s automatic time tracking software can help you boost productivity with employee time management. Our solution eliminates the tedious and manual aspects of time tracking so you can focus on what matters—improving your performance and productivity.
What is Time Management?
Time management is the coordination of tasks and activities to maximize the effectiveness of an individual’s efforts. Time management aims to enable people to get more and better work done in less time.
Elements of time management include organization, planning, and scheduling to take advantage of the time available best. Time management techniques also consider an individual’s particular situation and their relevant capabilities and characteristics.
The Biggest Time Bandits
According to a OnePoll survey, 60% of U.S. adults say there’s insufficient time to accomplish all their work, chores, and errands. The survey also found that the average person would need an extra four hours daily to complete everything.
Overcoming common time management challenges is a professional productivity training topic that can help employees professionally and personally. One of the best ways to increase quality time with family, get enough sleep, reduce stress, and achieve a better work-life balance is to improve time management skills.
Constant Pressure of Time Constraints
It’s doubtful that employees will say they have too much time. When one task is complete, others are always on the to-do list. Requests from co-workers, clients, vendors, friends, and family seem never-ending!
The Importance of Effective Time Management Skills
Identifying the most common time management problems and how to overcome them is essential. In surveys about desired workforce skills, overcoming time management challenges is often a top priority.
Identifying and Overcoming Time Bandits
The biggest time bandits are those that aren’t on the to-do list. They aren’t on the calendar. These time bandits get in the way of making progress on the most critical projects, daily activities, and even quality time with family.
Related Reading
Why is Time Management Important for Employees?
Projects of all sizes come with deadlines; meeting them without delays is critical to success. Effective time management helps you deliver work on time by breaking the project into manageable tasks and organizing them into a timeline. This way, you know exactly what to accomplish and when to avoid last-minute rushes that affect the quality of work.
In addition, time management reduces stress for you and your team. No one wants to work under pressure, and when you leave it until the last minute, it creates a stressful environment that affects productivity and morale.
Instead, managing your time well helps create a smooth workflow that ensures timely completion of tasks so both you and your team can focus on delivering quality work.
Boosting Employee Efficiency and Productivity
Effective time management is all about improving efficiency and productivity. The better you manage your time, the more organized you become, and the easier you find it to get through your work. This means improved performance and productivity, both for individuals and teams.
For example, when you manage your time well, you can prioritize tasks and create a logical approach to completing your work. This helps you focus on the most important jobs first and reduces the risk of missing deadlines. Effective time management ultimately helps improve the quality of your work and your team.
Reducing Employee Stress and Anxiety
Poor time management creates chaos and confusion in the workplace. When employees struggle to manage their time, they become overwhelmed and stressed. This is because, instead of having a clear approach to completing their work, they are left to fight against the clock to meet impending deadlines.
Not only does this affect the quality of work, but it also creates a stressful environment that is bad for employee morale. On the other hand, effective time management creates a sense of order in the workplace. It helps employees complete their work promptly to avoid undue pressure and stress from last-minute rushes.
Promoting a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Time management at the workplace is essential to improve the quality of work life and benefit the lives of workers outside the workplace. When employees can control things professionally, they get more time to focus on their personal lives and ensure a proper balance between work and life.
It is a fulfilling experience that encourages them to do better at their jobs. When workers know the tasks and know they can accomplish them within the given time frame, they feel a sense of calmness. This improves their quality of life as they are less stressed and happier.
Dashboards and Reports That Drive Results
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging.
Key Features
- Automatic time capture and categorization.
- Intuitive dashboards and actionable insights.
- Smart tagging system tailored to your workflow.
- AI-powered automation for repetitive tasks.
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters.
- Intelligent time capture directly in your browser.
Trusted by Leading Teams
Teams at Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures rely on Tackle to optimize time allocation.
Who Benefits
Perfect for executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals aiming to:
- Track strategic initiatives
- Measure team efficiency
- Optimize resource allocation
Easy Setup
- Connect your Google or Outlook calendar.
- Set up custom tags and automations.
- Gain valuable insights into time usage.
Start for Free
Tackle transforms time tracking from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool. Start using our automatic time tracking software for free with one click today!
Impact of Poor Employee Time Management
When team members struggle with their time management skills, everyone suffers. The productivity of the entire team decreases. Poor performance caused by one or more individuals can lead to unachieved targets and missed deadlines. It creates a backlog and puts pressure on other employees to perform.
This can also impact the work-life balance of certain employees who may have to work extra hours to compensate for the poor time management of their colleagues.
Unprofessionalism
Missed deadlines show that there is a serious lack of respect and professionalism. This will surely impact the career of the person in question. It can also act as a demotivator for the whole team because no one wants to put the work in only to fail because of someone else. This effect is even worse if the person with poor time management is their manager.
More widely, unprofessionalism can lower the excellent reputation of the business. Any client would be upset if you missed a deadline related to their project.
Lowered Motivation and Energy
It decreases employee morale when others feel like they can’t achieve anything because of one team member. Dissatisfaction is at an all-time high, while completion rates decrease as well. This all contributes towards lower energy levels. When people have little energy, they often start performing worse.
The risk is that a manager responds by piling on the pressure to perform. However, instead of rectifying the problem, this can make it worse. It creates a stressful work environment and can lead to high turnover rates.
Budget Overruns
Missed deadlines can become a massive cost for the business. Without proper time management training, deadlines may be missed repeatedly. For example, if you create products for a shipment leaving the next day, the shipment goes whether or not you’ve filled it up. The cost of this can be massive.
These conflicts can make your client relationships suffer, and you have to lose out on profit. Projects that drag on due to poor time management and planning can incur additional costs and waste profits.
Stressed Workplace Relationships
Even one employee with lousy time management can cause client relationships to break down. When you don’t have good time management, there is a chance that someone in another department is encountering a huge backlog due to your actions (or lack of it).
For example, one manager giving a payroll administrator the payment information at the last minute can cause the administrator a ton of stress. All because one manager failed to manage their time well. Over time, this sort of behavior is sure to cause resentment. This can result in repeated conflicts between employees.
Damaged Customer Relationships
One of the biggest time management problems is that when we produce low-quality work at the last minute, our clients will surely notice. They will no longer be happy with the service and may choose another provider. Recent customer service statistics say that “After just one negative experience, more than half (61%) of the customers say they would move to a competitor; this number rises to 76% in the case of multiple negative experiences.”
This loses the company money but also tarnishes its reputation. It’s even worse when you have contracts with the client, but it includes a service-level agreement. If you don’t meet this, you may have to pay.
7 Challenges of Employee Time Management
1. Ignoring Technology’s Benefits
Many employees still track their time using manual methods, like spreadsheets or pen and paper. These outdated approaches can be time-consuming and inaccurate. They make it easy to lose track of time and hinder productivity by forcing employees to pause their work to log their hours.
Automated timesheets, though, eliminate the need for manual time tracking. Instead of having to track their time, employees can focus on their work while software automatically logs their time and performance.
2. The Trouble With Distractions
Distractions are the enemy of productivity. Research shows that the average employee is interrupted 50 to 60 times daily, and 80% of these distractions are insignificant. While a few diversions can help improve focus, an excessive amount will have the opposite effect.
The key to managing distractions is to limit them as much as possible and have a plan for dealing with interruptions when they occur.
3. The Myth of Multitasking
Despite what many people believe, multitasking isn’t an effective way to get more done in less time. Studies show that multitasking can reduce productivity by as much as 40%. This is because when you switch between tasks, you lose time. Most productive people focus on one task at a time and don’t allow interruptions to disrupt their work.
4. Procrastination is a Productivity Killer
Procrastination is an all-too-common issue that plagues employees in every industry. When you put off your work, you’re not only delaying the inevitable, but you’re also increasing your stress levels. Research shows that procrastination is often linked to a fear of failure and can negatively affect your health and job performance.
To avoid procrastination, it’s best to understand why you’re putting off your work and to develop strategies to get back on track.
5. The Problem With Mobile Devices
Smartphones can be huge productivity killers. While they enable us to communicate quickly and efficiently, it’s easy to get distracted by mobile notifications and apps when we should be working.
For instance, if you receive an email and respond to it on your phone, you might get distracted by a social media notification. Before you know it, you’ve spent 20 minutes on your phone instead of focusing on the task.
6. Low Energy Impacts Productivity
To improve productivity, you need to have enough energy to get through the day. If you’re tired, focusing on any task, let alone your most important projects will be challenging. Improving your sleep and nutrition can help boost your performance. In addition, everyone has different productivity patterns.
Some people work best in the morning, while others don’t hit their peak performance until later in the day. Identify when you work best and schedule your most challenging tasks.
7. Busy Does Not Equal Productive
Just because you’re busy doesn’t mean you’re productive. We often get caught up in many low-priority tasks that drain our energy and make the workplace a mess. The issue is this may cause unneeded stress. Asking yourself if the project you’re working on is beneficial and how it helps accomplish the end objective will help you avoid wasting time on pointless activities.
Related Reading
- Google Sheets Time Tracking
- Time Tracking Software for Lawyers
- Time Tracking Software for Designers
- Time Tracking Software for Virtual Assistants
8 Employee Time Management Tips To Boost Productivity
1. Plan Your Work
Planning plays a vital role in time management as both go hand-in-hand with each other. You can make the most of your time only when it is thoroughly planned. When discussing planning, you don’t necessarily have to follow a strict routine. Instead, it means making more intelligent decisions by knowing when to do a task or an activity.
The idea behind time management is to work smarter rather than harder and make time to do other things. You can use project planning software to plan your tasks and save time smartly.
Pro tip: List down all the tasks you need to accomplish. Break them into smaller, manageable steps. This provides a visual representation of your workload.
2. Prioritize Your Tasks
Prioritizing your daily tasks is the key to successful time management. Many employees start their day with unimportant tasks or something that can be quickly done later. Prioritization helps you realize that not everything you do is necessary. It is essential to focus on your priorities to achieve success at work.
Figure out the most critical tasks and the urgent ones. This categorization will help you focus on what needs to be done. You can use various project management tools to set your priorities straight from when a project starts.
Pro tip: Start your day by creating a to-do list, then use a prioritization framework (like the Eisenhower Matrix) to identify the most critical tasks that align with your goals. The Eisenhower matrix is a highly effective time management technique, with 100% of users experiencing a sense of control over their work 4 to 5 days a week.
3. Avoid Multitasking
Multitasking is one of the most considerable time-wasting activities. Instead of accomplishing too many things, you achieve nothing out of them. The best way to utilize your time is to accomplish one thing at a time and accomplish it before jumping to the next. Make a list of tasks that must be performed based on their priority.
Not only would you be able to focus better, but there would also be fewer distractions. And no distractions mean less likelihood of mistakes.
Pro tip: Avoid multitasking; it reduces productivity. Instead, techniques like the Pomodoro Method can be used to dedicate focused time blocks to each task.
4. Minimize Distractions
In our everyday life, distractions cost us many valuable hours in a day. Mobile phones, chatty coworkers, and social media are common distractions at work that almost cost us three hours a day. To not let these distractions eat up your time, it’s better to cut them off entirely from your schedule.
Take a moment to learn about the things that distract you. If social media and mobile phones are halting your productivity, set a fixed time in a day when you can check your social media.
Pro tip: Identify your most considerable time sinks: Social media, email, and unnecessary meetings. Schedule dedicated time slots for specific tasks, minimizing distractions during focused work periods.
5. Schedule Breaks
Regular breaks while working is an effective way to stay productive all day. But its effectiveness is subject to management risk, especially when you start taking too many breaks. You can’t power through a big project or task in one go; you need a break. What’s even better is having a well-scheduled break time.
Pro tip: Take a walk, do some quick stretches, or plug in earphones and listen to your favorite music. Do whatever helps you to relax and get back to work with energy later, but don’t take more than 10 minutes.
6. Find Your Most Productive Hours
The next time management hack is to match your highest priority work to your highest productivity hours. The basic idea here is to check in with yourself frequently to track when, where, and how you’re the most productive.
Research clearly shows our day is driven by cycles that affect how alert and motivated we are. For example, you might be at your highest brain capacity, with your best focus and attention, before lunch hour and slow down significantly in the evening.
So, if you have a project that involves critical decisions and complex thoughts, the best case scenario is to manage it in your “golden hours.”
Pro tip: Schedule essential tasks when you’re most energized and productive, whether early mornings or focused afternoon blocks. Listen to your body’s natural rhythms.
7. Accept Your Limitations
Even with 110% effort, there will be occasions when you simply cannot get things done within the specified time frame. This is where you accept that there are limits to how productively and efficiently you can manage your time. For example, outsourcing and delegation are your best shots if you have twice the daily workload.
Don’t just assume you can get everything you want done in any given time frame. Remember, doing this will only make it harder to manage your time effectively.
Pro tip: Don’t overload yourself. Know when to say no and delegate tasks. Learn to politely decline tasks that don’t align with your priorities or workload.
8. Use a Time Tracking Software
This is the best thing you can do to significantly improve your time management skills without complicating things. Intelligent time management is the need of the hour for project managers and teams juggling multiple tasks simultaneously. Without a good time-tracking tool, you are putting yourself and your team at a significant disadvantage.
When you don’t know where your team’s time is going and which tasks are taking how much time, how are you supposed to detect time wastage at the workplace? On the other hand, using a powerful time-tracking software like Tackle enables you and your team to stay on top of your schedule.
Start Using Our Automatic Time Tracking Software for Free with One-click Today
Tracking employee time is often a painful process for both employees and managers. Manual time tracking typically involves tedious spreadsheets or clunky software that slows productivity instead of enhancing it. Employees must log their hours independently, often forgetting to record time for specific tasks or projects. This leads to inaccurate data that can hurt business performance.
For managers, the challenges of manual timesheets are even more significant. Time tracking is often met with resistance from employees who view the process as a way for management to keep tabs on them.
Time tracking also adds to their workload. Managers must sift through timesheets to find and make sense of the correct data. This takes time away from their own tasks and can lead to errors. Even worse, manual timesheets delay essential business processes like payroll and project budgeting.
Tackle Automates Time Tracking for Employees and Managers Alike
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package: a smart tagging system that works your way, AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff, flexible reporting tools to track what matters, and intelligent time capture right in your browser.
Trusted by Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures teams, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
Tackle transforms time tracking from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool; whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization,
Start using our automatic time tracking software for free with one click today!
