2 + 1 tips for better time management
Original Text by: Yiolanta Tsavdari
Translated by: Maria Oikonomou
Researchers at Irvine University in California focused on how employees can improve their time management skills in order to stop switching between tasks and stay focused.
Studies have shown that a typical office worker is interrupted every 3 minutes and 5 seconds, while it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to work. This waste of hours means a loss of 28 billion hours per year, and as we all know time is really important. Worth noticing is the fact that the equivalent of these hours in money is $ 1 trillion loss per year for the US economy.
Therefore, the following tips aim to improve employees’ time management skills as to stay focused on their work.
Time management: Review the to-do list
Check your schedule carefully to find out where you spend most of your time. If, for example, you spend a lot of time in your meetings, then you should reconsider the importance of each meeting and see if it really needs to take place.
Avoid switching between tasks
According to psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura, employees should focus on one specific part of their job at a time and not stop in order to complete a second one, and then return to the original.
Three practices can help you get in the “flow state” you need:
– Quieting internal stimuli that are not affected by any other thought.
-Blocking external stimuli (noise, children, texts, phone calls).
-Use of practical mental processes (if you are accustomed to meditating, you will be able to control your thinking better and be more focused).
Avoid excuses
When you do your work in an office where you are surrounded by colleagues, then this environment itself is related to responsibility. Your colleagues or superiors can see whether you are doing your job properly or not. But when you work from home, things are different. There is no one to supervise your work and this, while for some people works positively, for many is a subversive factor.
Αν επιθυμείς να διεκδικήσεις υποτροφίες στην Ελλάδα ή το εξωτερικό, ο Οδηγός Υποτροφιών του Citycampus που μόλις κυκλοφόρησε σου προσφέρει ό,τι χρειάζεσαι!