Essential Tips to Make the Best Use of Your Time
Always chasing your team for status updates? Running lengthy meetings that accomplish little? Feel like you’re constantly drowning in deadlines? You may have a time management problem on your hands.
If you’re not strategic with your time as a project manager, control of your project can quickly get away from you. Fear not though! I have some simple strategies to help you quickly step into more effective time management.
Tip One: Learn to say ‘NO’
You’ll field a lot of requests when managing a project, and saying yes to all of them isn’t a good thing. It leads directly into always feeling behind – which is not where you want to be as the project manager.
Ensuring that each thing you work on provides value is at the heart of effective project time management. Saying no to the wrong things will ensure you have time to say yes to the right ones.
How can you best say no strategically? You need to consider each request through the lens of several questions:
- How will this request impact my time and the project timeline?
- Is this something we really have to do?
- How does this align with our overall project goals?
- Will saying yes to this negatively impact the project scope?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you may need to come back with a polite and professional, “I understand you want this request, but I’m going to have to say no to it.”
Remember, your job as a project manager is to keep the big picture project goals in mind. That means making hard decisions that will help you deliver on the project due date as promised.
More time management strategies
I have a few other helpful project time management strategies to share, and I cover them in detail in my latest video. It explains:
- How to run meetings that make good use of everyone’s time
- The essential project document that will eliminate team-chasing
- Why multi-tasking is the enemy of time management and what to do instead
- What to do before your kickoff to save time down the road
Follow me over to YouTube and we’ll keep chatting about this!
If you want even more project manager tips on every aspect of managing a successful project, make sure you check out my SLAY Project Management course where I give you all the templates, tips, and techniques to implement if you want all your future projects to be productive and successful.
Adriana Girdler, PMP | Creator of Slay Project Management™
