When you first enter your office, you may already have a huge list of tasks you need to accomplish for the day. From answering your coworkers' emails to dealing with clients' questions about credit cards, you might barely have time to have your first cup of coffee before noon hits. And by the time you feel like you're ready to take a few moments for yourself, it may be 5 p.m., and you're all ready to head home. Plus, if you find that you're not organizing your tasks, you could miss an assignment you had scheduled for the day, such as dealing with loan applications or researching the latest credit card rates. Here are a few time management tips you can use throughout the day:
Mark down your schedule in a detailed fashion
You may have a number of tasks to finish in a given day, such as answering clients' questions about how to best deal with paying off a credit card to dealing with short-term loan applications. In order to help you organize all your assignments you should create a few lists to help organize your day. Making one long list can cause you to become disorganized and miss a few things, so you should divide everything into different categories. Entrepreneur Magazine recommends four different sections:
- Schedule: This is an all-encompassing list of everything that is going on during your day. Smartphones can be a great place to keep this information, as they can organize it all properly.
- To-do list: This list will have all the tasks you need to accomplish in a given day, week or month. A good bet is to write down the duty you need to perform and put a defined due date next to it.
- Reply list: Answering your messages is important and if you're getting inundated with a million of them in one day, it could be hard to keep track. Write down all the messages you need to reply to and make sure you record whether it was a phone or email message.
- Conference/meetings list: Reserve one section for your meetings, especially if you have a lot of them.
Organizing your day like this can help you be more personal with your members, which is something credit unions are known for.
Plan your day at the beginning
Doing all your tasks in a random order works for some people, but if you don't have a clear-cut plan for what you need to accomplish during the day, you could forget about a task. Spend the first few minutes of your day looking at your schedule and to-do list and see what needs to be accomplished. To help you get everything done quicker, try setting a finish time for each.
Turn off distracting sites
Perusing your friend's Facebook page or checking out the latest news on Twitter can be fun, but you shouldn't let social media dominate your day. A little self-control will be the biggest tool here, as you should log out of these websites and leave them alone until you get home.
Take a breather
Even though your are abstaining from social media, that does not mean you shouldn't take a few minutes for yourself. Constantly grinding can be tiring, and this could result in making mistakes. Be sure to give yourself a few minutes each day to let your brain relax and recharge your batteries. This can include a quick walk around the office, a trip to the local convenience store or responding back to texts from your friends.