Modern workers have heaps of interruptions to deal with daily, from message pings and email notifications to social media and other personal distractions.

US workers, for example, check their emails every 37 minutes on average. This amounts to 15 times a day.

For remote workers, unnecessary meetings are another major distraction. According to Zippia, low-value tasks such as these take up 51% of a corporate employee’s workday. The American Psychological Association found that if these small tasks keep interrupting other more important tasks, it leads to a 40% drop in an employee’s productivity.

To prevent financial loss due to productivity drop caused by work disruptions, you must focus on helping your employees adopt better time management skills.

This article outlines the most effective methods to properly manage work time and improve productivity. You’ll also learn how to monitor work-from-home employees to further support the positive effects of time management practices.

Benefits of Efficient Time Management in Remote Work Environments

Effective time management strategies for remote teams often leverage project management tools to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows. By utilizing these tools, teams can prioritize tasks, set clear deadlines, and maintain accountability, ultimately boosting productivity.

Implementing and adapting time management strategies into your remote team’s daily routine can help in different ways:

1. Managing Distractions: Remote work environments can sometimes hinder discipline. Helping your employees implement an effective time management method can make it easier for them to ignore distractions and stay on task.
2. Improved Productivity: Skillful time management brings improved focus and productivity. Once your employees get the hang of efficient time management, they will be able to do more quality work in a shorter amount of time.
3. Enhanced Reliability: Focused and productive employees can be trusted to finish all their tasks on time regardless of their location. In other words, to have a reliable and efficient workforce, ensure your remote employees have the necessary time-management skills.
4. Better Quality of Work: Setting aside time for demanding tasks gives your employees a chance to enter the deep work state. This ensures better quality of work, improves employee satisfaction, and reduces stress.
5. Work-Life Balance: Poor time management at work often means that work spills over into personal time. When you help your employees manage their tasks efficiently, they can achieve a healthy work-life balance more easily.

Strategies & Tools for Better Time Management

These are the proven strategies and tools that can help your staff manage their time and tasks more efficiently:

1. Set up a Routine

Working from home can wreak havoc on a person’s discipline. Despite having flexible work hours, suggest that your employees create a daily schedule and give their best to stick to it.

They can work into this schedule the time for personal errands as well as their breaks. Highlight that their household members must be familiar with their schedules.

Advise them to also set up a dedicated workspace. This way they reduce the possibility of in-person interruptions and create a structured workday mindset that improves discipline.

2. Resist Distractions

Resisting distractions may be even harder at home where your employees are their own primary supervisors.

Talk to your employees and point to the most frequent time wasters when working remotely. These are usually the TV, chores, personal mobile phone, and access to entertaining content.

Explain that it’s best they choose a work nook where they can’t see or hear any of the usual distractors. Also, remind them to put their phones on mute and designate several work breaks to check for missed notifications.

3. Define Goals

Having short and long-term goals improves motivation and a sense of accountability. To help your employees set their own time-management goals, think about organizing a training session.

Following the S.M.A.R.T. framework may be the most effective for this purpose. This means setting goals that are:

• Specific.
• Measurable.
• Achievable.
• Realistic.
• Timely.

Some of good examples of time-management goals are:

• Reducing the social media time to 15 minutes during work breaks
• Making morning routine quicker to start the work day earlier

4. Set Priorities

Be clear about the level of priority of each project. This will help the managers prioritize tasks and give relevant information to employees.

Advise your employees to make a priority-based to-do list at the beginning of every week. Recommend they create similar daily lists. Then, they can create detailed schedules and block time for particularly demanding tasks.

Remind them to also include some free time in their schedules. This way they can adapt the list if a new urgent task comes up.

5. Strive for Maximum Productivity

To reach maximum productivity, there are several time-management practices your employees can implement:

Use Your Knowledge about Yourself

Suggest your employees schedule their most demanding tasks during their peak focus hours. If they are insecure about some of their assignments, encourage them to block longer periods for those tasks.

Block Time for Uninterrupted Work

Blocks of uninterrupted work enable maximum productivity. Instruct your employees to schedule focus time for a demanding task and turn off every source of personal and work-related notifications.

Try Pomodoro Technique

Some people work better when they make short but frequent breaks. Pomodoro consists of 25-minute focused work periods, combined with 5-minute breaks. The tricky part here is to stick to your intervals.

6. Rely on Monitoring Software

Implementing monitoring software primarily helps track time more easily. However, more robust versions of these tools can help your company and employees in many more ways:

• Resisting distractions more easily—Knowing they are being monitored helps employees be more disciplined.
• Tracking how well employees stick to their designated time blocks—Tracking time will help your employees better see how much time they really spend on a task.
• Gauging workers’ discipline better—Powerful monitoring software measures every minute of idle time, so it gives a realistic picture of an employee’s discipline.
• Providing proof of work—Computer monitoring tools that track the resources that employees use and enable screenshots also provide proof of work. This allows employees to turn off notifications during their focused work periods and answer no messages without worrying their managers might think they are slacking.

Conclusion

Helping your employees learn and brush up on time-management skills benefits both the company and the employees. Thanks to better organization, employees can reach peak productivity without working longer hours. This way you ensure financial stability as your company stays competitive and your employees stay satisfied and loyal.