Time management skills

Time management is the ability to use your time productively and efficiently. The idea is to organize your tasks and use your time effectively to get more things done each day. This can help lower stress levels and improve productivity both at work and at home.

Time management skills encompass a wide number of skills, which facilitate the better organization and management of one’s time. Some of the pivotal time management skills include organisational and prioritizing competences and meeting deadlines.

You are working in a company operating in the electrical engineering sector. You are in charge of a big project and you have a 10 days deadline to elaborate a research report and to present it to the Management Board. Your company is hosting mobility placements and due to the Covid-19 situation there was a change in the original programme and next week you need to train 20 students on different job tasks. What are you going to do:

There is no way that you could handle this situation. You call the person, responsible for the mobility programme and change the dates for the training after your deadline.

You estimate the time, effort and resources needed for each task – it’s a lot of work and you decide to focus more on your report and to neglect the students training.

You know that both tasks are important - you develop an action plan, break the large assignments into smaller, separate important from urgent, identify inefficiencies in your workload and suggest ways to improve processes. You re-assess regular duties to determine what will work in the new situation and what will not.

You work for a big international company. It's Friday evening at the office and throughout the week you have received many different tasks, some of them urgent and long, some shorter and not so urgent. How would you prioritize your work for next week in order to meet all deadlines?

You panic because of the enormous workload and you just start working on the shortest ones.

You view the tasks you have and you get nervous and confused because of your workload. You start with the most urgent projects.

At the beginning of each week, you sit down with your agenda and write out everything you need to get done. You prioritize your tasks based on their due date, the importance and how long a project will take. You find that it’s best to break up big projects into smaller chunks to make them more manageable.

You were asked to run a project team to complete a very important task. It is a high-pressure situation, because the project is really significant for the company and you have to complete it rapidly and perfectly. How do you manage the stressful situation?

You completely panic because of the short deadline. You try to assemble a team but you are unable to work in such stressful situations. You ask your boss to assign the project to someone more competent.

You are not sure how to deal with the stressful situation, because this project is really important for your career. Due to the stress you tend to focus too much on insignificant details, without distributing the work properly between the team members and risk to fail.

You assembled a team of the most experienced colleagues and determine milestones for each day. After that, you delegated tasks based on the knowledge and experience levels of each team member. Based on the assigned due dates, you create several milestones that all lead up to the final deadline. Your own deadline is usually two or three days in advance. This way, you can complete your tasks and still have time left to review everything before turning it in.

Prioritization competencies

You have been assigned with a really long project to finish. How do you make sure to meet the deadline?

You panic because of the enormous workload and don’t know how to distribute the work so you just start without an agenda, hoping for the best.

The project is too long and you get confused on how to distribute the work. You elaborate an agenda but at the end you realize that you probably won’t finish on time, so you overdo the work in the last moment.

Based on the assigned due dates, you create several milestones that all lead up to the final deadline. Your own deadline is usually two or three days in advance. This way, you can complete your tasks and still have time left to review everything before turning it in.

You have planned carefully all the urgent tasks that you need to finish today. However, you just received an unexpected urgent task and you don’t have enough time planned on your daily agenda. How do you deal with the situation?

That’s too stressful and you don’t know how to react, so you give up and call in sick.

You stress out at first and you are not sure how to organize your work. You sit down and elaborate a new daily agenda, including the new task and start working rapidly and not very carefully in order to finish all on time.

You remain calm and examine carefully your agenda. You identify the tasks, which are not so urgent and you exchange the unexpected urgent task with them.

In your current position, you have both a new development project as well as two maintenance projects that you are responsible for delivering. While the new development project is important, the maintenance projects are urgent and if and when something breaks it needs to be fixed immediately. How do you deal with multitasking?

You prefer to work with one task at a time.

You are unsure how to work on three different tasks simultaneously, so you try to develop an agenda. However, you have difficulty concentrating on diverse tasks.

You plan your weekly workload by including all three tasks. This way, you can effectively switch between the tasks.

Organization competencies

You have been assigned with few not important and not urgent tasks. Lately, you have been feeling tired, unmotivated and lazy, you easily lose concentration and start to postpone your tasks. What would you do to avoid procrastination?

You think it’s normal to be not so productive sometimes so you don’t try to avoid procrastination. You just relax and enjoy the moment of less workload.

You are unsure how to avoid it. You force yourself to start working but when you complete one task you start to relax and procrastinate again.

You remove all distracting factors from your workplace and you make a to-do list with milestones and rewards at every step completed.

You have been assigned with few not so important nor urgent tasks. It’s your birthday and you keep receiving messages on all your social media accounts. You feel unmotivated to keep working. How do you remain focused on your work?

You don’t think you need to work exactly today, after all it’s your birthday. You decide to complete your tasks tomorrow so you just relax and enjoy your social media activity.

You are confused on how to continue your work. You try to focus and so you put your phone on silent, but every time it vibrates you leave your work to check it.

You turn off the notifications on your phone and you block the distracting websites on your computer – you will check your social media activity at the end of the day. You focus on your agenda and you keep working.

You have been assigned with a very long project and you have to lead a team of 6 people to complete it on time. The project is very important and you need organize the team and distribute the workload carefully in order to complete the task within the deadline. How would you do that?

You believe that all team members should be given liberty to organize themselves. You set up a date before the deadline to meet with your teammates and discuss the completion of the project.

You set up an agenda, distribute the work and set up a date before the deadline to meet with your teammates and discuss the completion of the project.

You create and agenda with milestones and you distribute them among all team members. You believe that communication is central and so you conduct regularly meetings in order to be updated with everyone’s progress.

Meeting deadlines