A talent professional’s work can feel like it’s never done. You’re tasked with managing the people needs at your organization, often collaborating with stakeholders who feel their own needs should be prioritized.
So, what do you do when you’re overwhelmed with tasks? Working more hours isn’t the answer. Not only can working too many hours make you less productive but it can take a toll on your personal life and well-being. A better solution is being more efficient with the time you’re spending at work.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all time management strategy, there are some best practices that can help.
1. Learn to prioritize
Prioritization is the foundation of effective time management.
That means determining which tasks to plunge right into, which to set aside for later, and which to delegate or eliminate. “Understanding the process of prioritizing tasks can help you get through your never-ending to-do list,” says Beate Chelette, a leadership strategist in Los Angeles.
While the following prioritization strategies take somewhat different approaches, one or two may resonate with you.
Most Important Tasks methodology
If there are 20 items on your to-do list, you already know you can’t get to all of them in one day. Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, recommends using the Most Important Tasks (MIT) methodology to whittle down your list.
Pick no more than three tasks from your to-do list that you will focus on that day. Choose the activities that will have the greatest impact on your most important goals. To identify those tasks, Josh suggests asking yourself, “What are the things that would make a huge difference if I got them done today?”
For example, if spearheading the CEO’s succession plan will be transformative for your career or for the company, focus on tasks associated with that project.
Eisenhower Matrix
When you have demands coming in from every direction, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking every request must be handled at once. The Eisenhower Matrix, coined by and named after former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, helps you correct that line of thinking.
Using this strategy, you would categorize tasks like this:
- If a task is urgent and important, do it first.
- If a task is important but not urgent, schedule it for later.
- If a task is urgent but not that important, delegate it or outsource it.
- If the task is not urgent and not important, don’t do it at all.
Talent professionals often feel the pull of urgent but not important tasks from well-intentioned colleagues and must learn to address them so more important tasks can be prioritized.
ABC Method
With the ABC Method, author Alan Lakein suggests measuring a task’s importance and giving it a corresponding grade.
- Tasks with pressing deadlines or deemed very important to the organization score an A.
- Tasks that are important in the long run but not immediately would score a B.
- Tasks that would be helpful to do but would make little difference in achieving your biggest goals would score a C.
The biggest part of your day should be spent working on — and finishing — A tasks. Once they’re complete you move on to B tasks. C tasks should be scheduled for when you have extra time.
Pareto Principle
Another strategy for prioritizing your to-do list is the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, which says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Identify which of your activities have the greatest impact on your key performance indicators and organizational goals. Then do those tasks first.
For example, if helping employees learn new skills is helping your company address the skilled talent shortage and retain team members, then upskilling may be at the top of your list.
2. Conduct a time audit
A popular piece of budgeting advice is to write down where your money is currently going. The same advice can apply to time.
Create a pie chart that shows in detail how you’re spending your days, suggests Arianna Huffington in her LinkedIn Learning course Arianna Huffington’s Thrive 03: Setting Priorities and Letting Go. Note the average time common activities take so you have realistic expectations of what you can accomplish in a day.
You may find that you’re wasting two hours a week sorting through unimportant emails when an app can sort your email for you. By freeing yourself of those tasks, you create room for more important ones.
3. Set time limits
Getting caught up in a project for three hours can make you feel productive — unless it keeps you from working on an equally important assignment. Timeboxing is a strategy in which you create time allotments for all of the tasks you’ve prioritized for that day.
Timeboxing can be structured in different ways, including:
- Time blocking. When determining the length of a timebox, ask yourself questions like: “How long can I work before needing a break?” and “How much deep work is involved in this task?” Set aside a realistic amount of time to complete your task and block it off on your calendar.
- Pomodoro Technique. Work on a priority task for 25 minutes, followed by a five-minute break. After four cycles, take a longer 15-to-30-minute break — then repeat.
- 52/17 rule. Similar to the Pomodoro Technique, the 52/17 rule suggests 52 minutes of focused working followed by 17 minutes of complete rest and recharging.
Regardless of which method you choose, here’s the key to making this time management strategy work: When the allotted time has passed, you must stop working on that task.
4. Batch similar tasks
Frequently changing tasks can lead to a loss of momentum and reduce your productivity. Group similar activities together to stay focused on one area of your job at a time.
For example:
- Proactively source candidates for various open roles back-to-back
- Onboard new hires in cohorts
- Outline several L&D lessons in a single work block
Focus on the task at hand until it’s completed or until your timebox is over, then move on to your next activity.
5. Begin your day with the most daunting task
Is there a task you’ve been dreading so much that you keep putting it off? Do that one first.
Author and motivational speaker Brian Tracy shares: “The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning.” In doing so, you can get your most challenging task out of the way to feel accomplished and build momentum to complete easier tasks.
Your most daunting task may vary based on your strengths and interests. Some may feel overwhelmed getting started with a new talent initiative, while others may find analytics and reporting to be tedious busy work. Identify the project you’re least looking forward to doing — and get it out of the way.
6. Get control over workplace communications
A constant inundation of emails, Teams or Slack messages, phone calls, and other communications can suck up unexpected time in the most organized person’s day. Author and leadership coach Dave Crenshaw recommends scheduling certain times in your day when you focus on it and deleting or archiving every message once you read it unless you have to send a response. Of course, that means you’re not focusing on email at other hours of the day.
But what if you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your in-box that you’ll never find time to sort through? In his LinkedIn Learning course Time Management Tips, Dave provides this solution: Find a day in the past and declare “email bankruptcy” as of that date. Then archive all emails that are older than the day you picked. That frees up your inbox and you’ll still have all of those emails stored away in the unlikely case there is something you need.
7. Optimize meetings
If you feel like you have more meetings in recent years, you’re probably not alone. A study found that large U.S. organizations had 60% more remote meetings per employee in 2022 as compared with 2020.
Following some best practices can help your team build a better meeting culture and be more productive:
- Stick to the agenda. An agenda is a great tool to help attendees prepare for a meeting and stay on topic. Table any conversations that aren’t pertinent to the topic being discussed so you don’t run over your meeting time.
- Decline unnecessary meetings. One-third of meetings are unnecessary, wasting time and costing organizations $25,000 per employee every year. Review your existing meetings to reevaluate whether your presence is needed or if the meeting could be replaced with an email or a task in your project management software.
- Take advantage of meeting notes. Most employees (71%) say they’d feel empowered to skip unnecessary meetings if high-quality notes were shared in a timely manner. With so many meeting transcription tools on the market, this is an easy way to save time across your team.
- Implement a no-meeting day each week. Meetings can interfere with deep focus work and make it feel impossible to schedule time blocks. See if your team can set aside a day each week where nobody schedules meetings.
8. Do what’s quick and easy now
If a candidate or team member has a question that will take you one minute to respond to in a quick phone call or email, do it immediately. That’s the premise behind the One-Minute Rule, which is credited to happiness expert and author Gretchen Rubin.
Procrastinating on tasks that will take a minute to do will simply add to your to-do list and keep you buried beneath a pile of work. But quickly checking off those one-minute tasks means you won’t have to spend time scheduling them or energy thinking about them.
9. Know when to say “no”
Talent professionals often find themselves pulled in multiple directions, with requests coming from multiple people at once. Understanding your priorities and limitations will help you learn to say “no” when you can’t realistically take on a new task or commitment.
You may also choose to delegate or outsource the work if you’re able. For example, training your managers to write better job descriptions or build employee development plans can be more efficient than taking on those projects yourself. Hiring an outside firm can be particularly useful if internal resources lack expertise or if your team needs additional support on an urgent project.
10. Streamline and automate tasks
Invest the time upfront to streamline and automate key parts of your job that can help you improve efficiency in the long term.
For example, if you’re using AI to complete work tasks, note the prompts that have yielded the best output and begin building a set of best practices for prompt engineering. Set up automated reporting so you can save time on that task each month. Take the time to build cold email outreach templates that you can quickly customize when you’re recruiting passive talent. Or try using the LinkedIn AI-Assisted Message feature to create fully customized outreach messages to talent with just one click.
Getting organized and leaning on your HR tech stack to build efficiencies are forward-thinking ways to improve time management.
Final thoughts: Effective time management skills can be learned
As with all skills, time management can be learned and fine-tuned to meet your unique needs. You might find that one methodology or best practice doesn’t work for you — and that’s OK — there are plenty more to try. LinkedIn Learning offers a large selection of time management courses to help you examine your habits, find areas of improvement, and make targeted changes to your daily routines.
