Time is one of the most important resources we have. Yet, many professionals struggle to use it effectively. There are countless common time management challenges that you may face every day. They can affect not only your productivity, but also that of your business and its employees.

Fortunately, these challenges aren’t impossible to solve. In this guide, we’ll explore how you can overcome the biggest time management challenges—both for yourself and in your team. We’ll also cover how a high-quality productivity tool—time tracking software—will help you in the process.

The Most Common Time Management Challenges

Let’s start off by exploring some of the most common time management challenges that you may face in your professional career. The ones we’re going to be exploring today are:

• Procrastination
• Poor Task Prioritization
• Ineffective Delegation
• Perfectionism
• Distractions
• Lacking Organization
• Multitasking
• Overworking and Burnout

We’ll start exploring these in depth with one of, if not the most common time management challenge—procrastination.

One of the Most Common Time Management Challenges: Procrastination

We’re all very familiar with the concept of procrastination. It can be a tough habit to break for lots of professionals, as it has a wide variety of causes. You might struggle to start a task because it feels too daunting. Your progress on an ongoing assignment might stall because of high stress levels. Or maybe you’re struggling with a task because it’s too boring. Whichever cause affects you and your team, procrastination can result in low performance and delays across your business.

Poor Task Prioritization

Prioritizing tasks correctly is key to completing important ones on time. If you spend all your time working on secondary assignments, those that matter can quickly fall behind. You’ll then have to resort to overworking to complete these tasks on time. This not only causes lots of stress for you and your team, but will also result in a poor work-life balance. If you’re not aware, a healthy work-life balance is a vital part of performing well in the long term. Check out our guide on employee work-life balance to learn more about the topic.

Ineffective Delegation

Delegating tasks is important to get right for leaders. But, it’s also vital for your management team to do it correctly. This common time management challenge is closely tied to our previous talking point. If you fail to delegate a less important task, you’ll have to spend time doing it instead of something else more important. Another way ineffective delegation can get in the way of your team’s performance is by delegating to the wrong people. If you assign a task to someone who doesn’t know how to get it done well, you’ll have subpar results.

Perfectionism

Speaking of subpar results, sometimes they can be good enough to move forward. Striving for nothing but perfect outcomes can hold your team back quite a lot. You’ll spend more time than necessary on certain tasks—taking time away from other, potentially more important ones. Just like our last point of discussion, perfectionism is another common time management challenge related to task prioritization.

Distractions

Distractions are among the most common time management challenges for all professionals. In the modern work environment, distractions are everywhere: emails, social media notifications, and more. These issues can become even bigger in teleworking or remote working arrangements. Distractions will hold your team back from performing their best at all times. Fortunately, this time management challenge will typically have a smaller effect on your business. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore it either.

Lacking Organization

Staying organized is one of the most important parts of performing well. The most important areas where this matters are your company’s tasks, projects, and long-term goals. Organizing these in a way that allows your staff to stay up-to-date will help them make better decisions. They’ll know which tasks they should work on next, increasing employee autonomy at your business. You can achieve this with a high-quality productivity solution, like WebWork’s project and task management.

Multitasking

While computers are great at managing multiple tasks at once, human multitasking can be quite ineffective. Trying to juggle multiple assignments at once won’t allow you to focus your attention fully on any of them. As a result, you’ll not only complete whatever you’re working on more slowly but you’ll also make more mistakes. While multitasking may feel more productive, you should make sure your staff avoid it at all times.

Overworking and Burnout

As mentioned previously, overworking results in lots of excess stress. The cause behind this is burnout, which is a lot of unmanaged stress from one’s work responsibilities. If you don’t know, burnout has lots of negative effects, like low professional engagement. Burnt-out staff will perform much worse and produce lower-quality work with more errors. They’ll also be more likely to look for new work opportunities to increase their professional satisfaction. This will result in unnecessary costs for your business as recruitment is not a free process.

Overcoming Common Time Management Challenges with a Time Tracker

Having explored a few common time management challenges, let’s now cover how you can overcome them. We’ll be incorporating time tracking software, as it can make overcoming these challenges much simpler. The tips we’ll explore are the following:

• Monitor Productivity and Identify Common Time Management Challenges
• Take Advantage of Peak Productivity Hours
• Organize and Manage Tasks

Monitor Productivity and Identify Common Time Management Challenges

The first step to working against any challenge is identifying it. Time tracking apps make this easy with productivity-tracking features. Of course, you’ll have to use an app that offers such functionality, like WebWork. But, if you have one, it’ll help you see how well your team members are performing. You can then analyze their performance over a period and compare this data to how they’re doing now. If you notice any reduction in productivity, they might be dealing with one of the common time management challenges we explored above.

Take Advantage of Peak Productivity Hours

In a perfect world, professionals would perform their best throughout the entire day. In the real world, however, this is not the case. Instead, everyone has a set of hours when they perform their best. These peak productivity times are when your team will be able to focus the most and produce their highest-quality work. Taking advantage of these with a high-quality time tracker is easy. Simply track your team’s productivity throughout the day and see when they perform their best. You may need to experiment with various schedules, like flexible working hours, to get the best results from this strategy.

Organize and Manage Tasks

Many of the best time trackers offer task management features. These will help your team stay organized to complete their assignments more effectively. Task management systems are vital for correct prioritization and delegation strategies. Without them, your staff will also have trouble switching to new assignments once they complete a task. This will add unnecessary delays to your company’s work processes—which you should avoid at all times.

What to Look for in a Time Tracker to Overcome Common Time Management Challenges in Your Team

Before closing off this guide, let’s briefly explore what you should look for in a time tracker to overcome the challenges we discussed above.

Management Features

As mentioned previously, features like task management are vital to stay organized. However, other management functionality can help your team stay organized in lots of other ways. For example, leave and holiday management will help your staff prioritize their tasks correctly. They’ll be able to plan for the absences of their coworkers, as well as upcoming days off that may coincide with task deadlines.

Tracking Features

Tracking is important to ensuring your efforts against common time management challenges are working as intended. Without them, you won’t be able to tell what effect your changes have had on your business. Tracking functionality can help your team in lots of other areas of running your firm as well. So, choosing a tracker with more of these can get you better results.

Concluding Thoughts

Various common time management challenges affect every one of us at some point in time. Issues like procrastination and distractions can prevent you and your team from performing their best. However, the right strategy and tool can help you overcome these challenges easily. Using a time tracker to stay organized and monitor productivity levels will help you immensely. Over time, you’ll be able to see major improvements in your team’s work—enabling your business to speed up its growth.