Project manager time in 2022

Time in project management is a precious commodity. In any project management step, successful project managers efficiently manage project time and achieve project goals.

What consumes the project manager's time:

• Extending meetings

We probably all have at least once experienced a situation when participation in the meeting rendered carrying out planned tasks for a given day impossible. Managers have been shown to spend up to 70% of their time on various types of discussions and conferences! Can they be considered time thieves? It is undeniable that teamwork is one of the factors essential to running a project. However, the meetings tend to prolong themselves, wander away from the topic, and quite often imperceptibly change into social coffee parties. The most important thing is that any specific results of such meetings are hard to notice. This is why it is key to plan the meetings strategically and, above anything else, to convene them only when it is necessary. In many cases, they can be safely replaced with a telephone conference or tools for group work.

• Lack of planning

One of the most insidious time thieves is the conviction that planning is unnecessary since we know what we have to do anyway. Meanwhile, it is the lack of an action plan or mistakes at the stage of its creation that leads to bouncing from one task to another while our precious minutes disappear irretrievably. Without a precise "timetable," a specification of actions that have to be performed by us and those that can be delegated to others, and setting priorities, we deal mostly with reacting to and stacking up problems instead of accomplishing the goals important for the project. Meanwhile, according to time management principles, the daily schedule should be planned 60 percent of the time, with the remainder reserved for unexpected events. Although this requires lots and lots of self-discipline, this is the only way to regain control over our own time.

• Poor communication

Fruitless e-mail exchanges, endlessly prolonging phone calls, teleconferences that bring and mean nothing – today they take a lot of the Project Manager’s time. Even though every one of these communication channels undoubtedly possesses its undeniable advantages, when used ineffectively, they steal the time that could have been devoted to something else. To prevent losing it, it is worth using tools that help us communicate in the fastest and most effective way possible. The IC Project offers a range of functionalities in this field. Internal chat enables the user to talk with the rest of the team or any chosen person at any moment about the project or specific task without the need to leave the system and use other messengers. This module, along with the mail forwarding system, also allows us to keep the entire history of activities carried out within a given project, thanks to which no information gets lost and we do not have to laboriously scour different places searching for information important to us. Isn't this pure time-saving?

Time thieves, like all criminals, are masters of acting undercover. We usually get used to them and treat them as a necessary element of our everyday routine. Only after we nail them do we become aware of how much time irreversibly slips through our fingers. We must catch them red-handed and develop a successful strategy to optimize project manager time.