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10 Reasons Why Time Management is Important | Mark Pettit, Thriveglobal.com
The ability to manage your time effectively is important if you want to have more time for the people that matter and to reach your goals quicker.
Effective time management leads to improved productivity, quicker results and more success in business and life.
Understanding the importance of time management can create more time, more opportunities, less stress and the achievement of bigger goals.
Here are 10 time management tips to help you manage time and reach your goals quicker:
- Create a time audit
Time audit will help you identify activities to eliminate and activities to invest more time on. Simply list all of the activities do you in a week and time spent on each. Then ask yourself if that time investment is the best use of time.
Eliminate activities where appropriate and spend more time on the activites that will help you reach your goals quicker.
Focus on results not time spent.
- Become a planning master
If you’re clear on your goals, lay out clear plans to achieve those goals. This should include quarterly planning, monthly planning, weekly planning and daily planning. If you have no direction or focus for your day or week then you can easily become distracted and waste time.
- Focus time on your most important activity
Multi-tasking can waste hours of time every day. Choose the one thing and use time blocking to remove distractions. This will help mind and body stay focused and energised.
- Use the Pareto Principle to manage time
Use the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80:20 rule, to prioritise your time and energy. This rule suggests that 20% of something produces 80% of the results. Using the Pareto Principle look at how you can focus less time to produce a bigger result.
The Pareto Principle is all about leveraging a small amount of time and effort to deliver bigger results.
- Don’t worry about being perfect
Perfectionists think that nothing will ever be perfect so they spend too much time tweaking and amending to ensure that a project is perfect. Nothing will ever be perfect. Use your best capabilities to start a project and then work with someone else or delegate the rest.
- Prioritise your time
By focusing, and staying away from low value work you can achieve more by working less. This focus comes from being clear on your goals and an ability to prioritise and work on projects in blocks of time until completed. If you can free up an extra hour of time a day think how much more productive you’ll be.
- Celebrate progress
There are always things to celebrate and achievements made in every day. At the end of each day list three you’ve achieved. This will ensure you end your day feeling motivated and energised.
- Achieve goals faster
Many people have big goals that they don’t achieve. But without understanding the importance of time management, you may always big goals that you don’t achieve.
The reason. Too short deadlines.
If you want to achieve goals faster, set bigger goals with longer deadlines and smaller goals with shorter deadlines.
Every goal achievements build progress and momentum so make it easy on youself to achieve your goals.
- Increase energy by freeing up time
The answer is to take more time our of your business and life for rest and rejuvenation. This could be taken just for you or to spend with the people in your life that are most important.
More time out increases energy and motivation.
- Create time to do more of what you love
In business focus more of your time on the activities that you’re great at and love to do.
When you spend more time doing things you’re passionate about with people you want to work with, you creat a much bigger impact.
In your life, spending more time doing the things that you love is exciting and motivating.
What to Look For in a CV When Hiring a Remote Candidate | Andrew Fennell, Theundercoverrecruiter.com
Hiring a remote candidate is a little different from hiring someone to work in-office or on-premises. Remote workers have certain attributes that make them awesome at working independently and as any recruiter knows, there will be little “tells” hidden and sometimes not so hidden in a remote candidate’s CV.
What should a recruiter look for in a remote worker’s CV?
Commitment
A remote worker has to be committed and dedicated to getting their job done. If you can find that perfect level of commitment in a candidate, you can be sure that despite any of the comforts or distractions of working from home, and with the trust of working unsupervised, they will get their job done, and well.
Self-discipline
Self-discipline could be seen as the ability to consistently achieve or to regularly perform an activity, by using willpower to overcome distractions or hurdles.
Enthusiasm and passion
A remote worker doesn’t have a team to bounce ideas off or someone they can look to for words of encouragement. Their willingness to complete their tasks and do so well needs to come mostly from within themselves. This takes the form of enthusiasm and passion for what they do and who they do it for. If a remote worker doesn’t enjoy what they do, they won’t do it well.
Organization and time management
A remote worker’s CV should either visibly demonstrate or infer that the candidate is organized. If a remote worker loses focus or gets behind in their task, the impact for a business may be greater as it might not be noticed immediately.
Attention to detail
Remote workers are usually expected to submit completed work of one kind or another or perform duties that might not be checked by another employee. It’s mistakes in particular that will be costly to employers especially errors that aren’t picked up, perhaps until a customer is impacted.
Communication skills
Although they might not need to communicate, or even report in all the time, it is expected that when they do that communication is accurate and concise. A remote worker needs to be able to convey, perhaps even in an email or by telephone, if they are having problems or need a task carried out by a colleague.
Positions of trust
If you can see a remote working candidate has held a position of trust, this illustrates they were relied upon by another business to get their job done, effectively. And, it doesn’t have to be a remote position of trust. A supervisory or management role indicates a candidate had less supervision and was expected to be self-disciplined as well as making sure others performed their roles effectively.
An aptitude for technology
Technology is empowering remote working; employees can work as seamlessly remotely as they could in the same building with colleagues and on-premise technology. Remote workers need to use, sometimes multiple, communication and collaboration platforms.
Problem-solving skills
When working alone they’ll need to be resourceful when facing a challenge, as they may not be able to contact another employee or a manager immediately for assistance. Equally, a remote worker can’t be on the phone to a head-office or senior every five minutes.
Ability to work independently
A remote worker is unlikely to be successful if their personality is such that they excel only in a team environment. Look for jobs that show a remote working candidate has worked predominantly alone and enjoyed it.
Remote working experience
With the number of remote working jobs growing daily, the pool of available and experienced remote workers is falling, especially those with plenty of experience. As such, it’s the soft skills and attributes above, and others, either innate or gained during other work experience that will indicate if a candidate has what it takes to be a high-performing remote worker.
5 Breathtaking Ways to Inspire Your Employees in 2020 | Jacklyne Kweyu, Thriveglobal.com
Here are some tricks that you can use to keep your employees inspired.
- Respect your employees
Always treat an employee, the same way you would want someone else to treat you. Be courteous, polite, and kind while dealing with them. Put in mind the voice tone that you use and body language displays; matters too. Whenever an employee speaks to you, learn to listen first before reacting. By doing so, you inspire your employees; they have no reason to look for work elsewhere.
- Invest in your Employees
Experts say that investing in your employees is synonymous with investing in your company’s future. If you do not invest in them, turnover will be high, hampering your success.
You can have individual development plans for all your employees. Have them set and write down both their short term and long term goals. Do a follow up in cooperating one-on-one coaching if need be to help them achieve these goals.
Another way to invest in your employees is by organizing team building activities. Not only will they make work to be fun, but they will also create friendship and encourage teamwork.
- Be Transparent
Be open about what’s happening within your business that employees have a right to know. In a working environment, transparency inspires your employees and creates positivism by eliminating fear. Moreover, it makes employees open up about their achievements and shortcomings.
- Give Incentives
Always strive to inspire your employees by giving them an incentive whenever they do a good job. This is among the oldest known psychological principals of inspiring employees.
Create monthly awards and recognition events where people who worked exceptionally well get to be recognized and rewarded. You can give them a promotion if a vacancy is available or a handwritten thank you note. This will create healthy competition that business needs.
Inspiring your employees is all that it takes. Always recognize them whenever they do a good job, be open with information. Give them price incentives and above all respect them.
Once you perfect these motivation strategies, you will create a perfect working environment, and your result will definitely be superior dedication and optimistic perception of the company’s future. On top of it, your employees will be happy and your turnarounds will be minimal.
10 remote leadership jobs for virtual workers | Esther Shein, Techrepublic.com
The 10 remote leadership jobs listed by FlexJobs all offer some type of remote work arrangement, ranging from partial remote work to 100% remote, the company said. The positions include average salary information from PayScale, which may slightly differ depending on location, FlexJobs said.
Some common executive-level remote job titles include director, executive director, vice president, medical director, and various C-level jobs such as COO, CFO, and CEO.
The CMO oversees developing marketing plans that help companies gain brand recognition and customers. The CMO needs to understand the company’s marketplace position and heavily rely upon performance analytics to develop detailed strategies in this remote leadership job.
A CTO is in charge of the technological needs of a company or organization. The role finds and implements technology solutions to help a company succeed and leads the development and maintenance of a technology road map.
Communications directors help create a positive image of a company to the public by overseeing strategy and messaging. They may act as a spokesperson and contact for journalists and also monitor the public perception of the company.
In this remote leadership job, typically more than 10 years of experience in marketing, communications, or publishing can qualify you for this role. Common duties include determining a company’s content strategy based on the company’s and users’ needs, managing writers, creating an editorial calendar, and conducting SEO research.
Sales directors lead sales teams by providing vision and guidance. Approving sales projections and budgets, hiring sales managers, and working with marketing and logistics teams are some typical tasks.
Vice President of Business Development
This executive-level role develops and executes an organization’s sales and marketing plans. Creating new client relationships, writing proposals, managing a sales team, and setting team and company-wide goals are tasks of this job.
A VP of engineering will manage a team to get products completed. This role has a big-picture view of what stakeholders or clients need and the route to meet these needs. Many times, seven to 12 years of experience are needed to qualify for this executive-level job.
An operations VP most often works with the company president to assist with daily operations. With a thorough understanding of company operations, this role will provide business performance leadership, monitor finances, and evaluate operational procedures.
Vice President of Project Management
This role provides direction and leadership on project management tasks. A project management VP handles developing road maps, prioritizing projects, communicating with key stakeholders, and creating best practices.
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