Time management at work: How to make the most of your working hours

I have been working in an office in pharmaceutical market research for over 2 and a half years now. I started on the graduate programme and made my way up from a fresh grad out of university to a senior research executive. The biggest challenge that I faced as a new grad, and that I’ve seen in many grads coming through after me, is how to manage your time at work. As context, the way in which I work is project based, we have small project teams for each project that comes through and have to balance several internal calls, client calls and project work across projects. With this, comes a need to be able to manage your time effectively and be able to prioritise, plan but also be flexible to make changes when needed.

I’ve compiled some of the top tips I’ve learnt over my time working, hopefully some of these are useful for you and help you to manage your time effectively, to keep a good work life balance and make the most of the working hours you have.

Use your calendar

One of the first things that I learnt when working, is how valuable your outlook calendar is. To this day, it is the one tool that I rely on the most to keep me on track and manage my time effectively. All of my meetings come into my calendar, but I also use it as a way of blocking out my time for certain tasks. I like to plan out my time across the week and block out what I will be doing at what time between meetings. This really helps me to have a realistic idea of the time that I have left (if any!) once I’ve planned out my tasks and meetings.

I use a colour scheme in my calendar. Each project has its own colour, to make it easy for me to see at a glance what I will be doing for each project. It also prompts me to check in on projects that I haven’t planned time for, to make sure that nothing unexpected is going to come through.

My top tip would be to update your calendar regularly, add realistic blocks of time for each task but be prepared to be flexible when needed.

Plan ahead

Using your calendar is one thing, but planning ahead takes you to the next level. When I say planning ahead, I mean a good few weeks, if not a month ahead, or even to the end of your projects if you have good oversight of their timelines. Holding time early is important, as it helps you to understand in advance, where you are likely to have crunch periods. Then, you will be able to flag this to your project teams or make adjustments ahead of time, before you find yourself super busy and overwhelmed.

Prioritise

Learning to prioritise is also really important. Naturally, certain tasks are going to be more urgent or more important than others. The best tip I have to make sure your days run smoothly (but also to keep your project leads happy!), is to ensure you have a good understanding of what tasks should take priority. For example a client call is likely to take priority over internal meetings, and an urgent client task is likely to take priority over creating materials for another project.

Be flexible

This leads nicely to my next point about being flexible. Urgent or more important tasks are likely to come in when you least expect it, so being flexible whilst also keeping everything else you need to do on track, is what is going to help you be a time management pro!

Although you may be following everything above, using your calendar, planning ahead and prioritising, something which I often see (and have definitely been guilty of myself!) is being so rigid to the plan you’ve made, that you become resistant to moving things around.

However, the key to effectively managing your time is gaining an understanding of when there is a need to be flexible. It comes back to prioritisation, if an urgent client email comes in, that you need to action, but you also have a full day of work that you’ve planned, being able to quickly adjust your calendar is so important. The way that I do this, instead of panicking or becoming overwhelmed, is to see what is less important in my day, see what can be pushed back to the next day and see if there is anything that can be moved into next week. Once you’ve done this, it will become clear how and when you are going to realistically be able to do the urgent task, which leads nicely to my next point.

Communicate

Communicating with your project teams is crucial. You will need to develop an ability to be open, honest and realistic about the time you have. Although you don’t want to be inflexible, you need to be honest about time crunches you have, in order for the team to be able to plan and work around it. What you don’t want to do, is say you have time to do something, book other things on top of that time, and then not be able to do the task on time or to a good level of quality.

Also, by being open and having these conversations, your project team will be able to help you! You may actually find that someone else has more time and can take something off your plate or if not, they may have 5 minutes to talk to you and help you plan and prioritise.

However, if you don’t tell them, they won’t know! This is one of the biggest things I learnt in my 2 and a half years of experience. When I was a grad, I often couldn’t understand why people were continually giving me new tasks, when I was clearly super busy. However, the reality is, they probably didn’t have oversight on how busy I was. If you don’t tell them, they will expect you’re okay and are happy to take on extra tasks.

Set boundaries

My final comment is that even though a level of flexibility is necessary, please remember it is important to set personal boundaries.

Working within my standard hours as much as possible is the biggest boundary I set. I try my hardest to finish on time, to maintain a good work life balance. Sometimes, of course, I will work late or start early to plan my day, but I set strict boundaries on this. In my case, I am happy to work late to meet deadlines if necessary, but I won’t work late on non-urgent tasks. I have seen so often, team members working late on non-urgent tasks, which naturally means they take on more during the day. This ultimately leads to them creating an expectation that they can take on more work than is actually possible within their working hours.

Also, going back to the point around communicating with your project teams. If you have too much to do and have ended up in a situation where you’re working late to finish a number of non-urgent tasks, please do tell someone. It is okay to reset, and say no when needed to certain tasks. The last thing you want to do is say yes to everything and then end up in a situation where your only choice is to work into the night to finish what you’ve agreed to. If you are honest and realistic about your time from the beginning, you can prevent these situations from occurring.

In summary, time management is one of the most important skills you can learn, in order to feel productive and support your teams, but also maintain a healthy work life balance.