How to Manage Time as a Manager

Your daily activities measures your productivity for that day. As a manager, it is important to have a time management plan for such activities. Having one implies you have gone through the rudiments of planning and determining which activities should be included in your daily schedule.

The first thing that should be looked into are the types of activities that can come your way on daily basis as a manger. Now, let's take closer look at these activities and see how they can affect our time management skill.

Boilerplate Activities

These are activities that are repeated on a daily basis. They are things you just have to do in a workplace environment and can be equated with brushing your teeth and having a bath before setting off for work. You are already on automation with such activities and they should not be included in your time management plan for daily activities as a manager.

This does not mean that you will not be doing them but I hold the opinion that such tasks are not “important” or strategic enough to be included in your time management plan. They will be there in form of the gaps that will be in your time plan because no time management plan will fill all the spaces as it were.

However, if a boilerplate tasks takes up a major portion of your time daily, then they should be included. If you must make a round in the company's assembling unit where you spend between 30 to 45 minutes daily, then it would make sense to include that in your daily plan. Boilerplate routines as a manager can be important but the issue here is that they are so part of your daily routine that it has now become second nature to go through the motions.

It is not a boilerplate routine if you do not do it every day. You should not regard it as a boilerplate routine if you do it in specific days of the week even when they often reoccur. You should look at them as special routines because they are tied to specific days of the week. As a manager, you are in the best position to know those routine that you do every day and can be classified as a boilerplate routine.

Special Activities

Special activities are activities that are tied to particular days of the week. They are still activities that reoccur when you look at the month of quarter but they differ from boilerplate routines because they do not occur daily. They should have a special place in your schedule because accomplishing them makes for a productive day.

Unusual Activities

Unusual activities are special activities that do not occur regularly but happen as response to a development. As a manager, you might be given a set target or project that must be concluded within a day. After the project is concluded it may never be revisited for that month, quarter or year. 

It is an unusual activity, something that is out of place from your daily or weekly grind. It could be a project that would last a month but it is placed under unusual activities because once the project is completed you do not revisit it.

An example of an unusual activity may be a task from your boss or those at the top. This is not something that happens every day and you know you have to get on with it. 

Unusual activities are time bound activities that you have to address and they can be in form of an activity that has to be accomplished within a day, week or month. In such a case, you will have to include the part of the activity you want to accomplish for that day in your list of daily activities.

List The Activities A Day Before

These activities have become goals and targets. Listing them before the day starts gives you time to apply all the time management tools available to you. 

You do not have to list it a day before as you can list such activities weekly so that you can follow through on the tools of time management. However, you must bear in mind that some unusual activities might crop up without warning, meaning you will just have to make room for them whenever they do.

Determine Their Order Of Preference

The boilerplate routines are usually fixed in your template of daily activities. You cannot do anything with respect to where to place them because they are routines that are probably time-bound and you have to do them. 

However, special activities are the type of activities that you can prioritize. Preparing before the day gives you a window of opportunity to know how to organize yourself, address the important issues and contribute to the effective use of your time.

Note on Unusual Activities

Such activities may be given to you on any given day and there are times you may have to submit a report or accomplish the task on the same day. Unusual activities are the type of activities that you may not have the time to have some kind of advance preparation.

As a manager, creating a time management plan could be a critical ingredient for increasing your productivity and standing out from others. A workplace environment is a highly competitive one and standing out as a manager means you have to do something extra that sets you apart.

• Daily activities in a workplace environment can be classified into boilerplate, special and unusual activities.


• Boilerplate activities are routine you go through everyday.


• Special activities are activities you repeat but are on given days


• Unusual activities are those that crops up usually without prior notice and once you do them they may hardly come up again.


• Planning your daily activities should not be on the same day of the activities.


• It includes listing your daily activities and creating an order of preference

A time management plan is more than just trying to beat the time. You do not want to be a time-chaser but beyond this, it is a means of systematically dealing with issues in such a way that you become more productive while using your time.

In the Part I we stopped at the point of making a list of your activities and creating an order of preference. In this concluding part, we are going to follow the next logical step by identifying the hurdles in each activity.

Identify The Hurdles

Once you have listed the activities in their order of preference, the next step will be to identify that hurdles or challenge each activity presents. This is a good reason why this list should be drawn up before time because knowing what the hurdles are will prepare you for them.

Identifying hurdles beforehand hand will cut down the time you would have spent to tackle the activity because you already know the challenges that would arise. This is one good reason why you should plan your daily activities ahead of time as a manager as you familiarise with the hurdles that will give you an edge over them.

Create Solutions For The Hurdles

This will be the time when you may have to make some calls to see how you can create solutions for the hurdles. There is nothing that eats into your time than when you start on an activity and meeting a challenge that leaves you stumped. You waste precious time in analyzing the problem and negotiating solutions. 

A great time management tip would be for you to plan ahead and if you had done this initially you may have foreseen the problem and found a solution to it before setting out on the activity.

You become highly productive when you apply this method of planning out your daily activities because you have already seen the hurdles that will come your way and devised means of dealing with them. This period of creating solutions for the hurdles in your daily activity is probably the most important for the manager when it comes to time management. 

mangers who do not apply time management techniques may end up wasting the whole day on an issue that they could have resolved before they started on the activity.

Another reason why you can easily find solutions when you are planning your daily schedule a day before is that you will not be under the kind of pressure you would if you had started the activity to only discover the hurdle. You can apply negotiation skills to get others to do what you know will create the necessary solution without pressure by calling them up and telling them what you want from them.

There are so many ways this can play out but the summary of it all is that you have prepared a solution that will help you to tackle and overcome that hurdle in an efficient manner.

Things To Do On The Given Day

The boilerplate routines aside, you can also start by applying the solutions to the hurdles of your daily activities if the situation call for it or just take on the activities one at a time and apply the solutions as the problems come up.

Applying this process of listing out your daily activities beforehand, creating an order of preference, identifying the obstacles and providing solutions beforehand will make you become one of the most efficient managers in the organization. It will also give you the training to handle unusual activities and in effect equip you to take on developments you never saw coming as you will be able to critically analyze, compartmentalize, negotiate and implement solutions to the issues.

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