Learn the best time management tips for new managers so that you can easily transition, be an effective manager, and feel confident in your new role.
1. Take a moment to celebrate!
This is an underrated time management tip for new managers but one of the most enjoyable.
You have worked hard to reach this point in your career and finally step into a management role. Make sure you take a moment to celebrate and recognize yourself for what you have accomplished.
It is important to celebrate your accomplishments and make sure you are taking time for yourself. You are about to undertake many new responsibilities and tasks that will pull you in many directions, so taking this time for yourself is crucial to your self-care.
Celebrating yourself and your accomplishments also signals to your brain that you are important and matter. These messages will become more and more critical as you become responsible for more and more people.
2. Set aside time to learn
It may feel like you have too much to do and too much on your to-do list to set aside time to learn, but learning how to be an effective manager is a crucial skill.
The influx of your workload is a lot to handle when you are a new manager. It feels like there is too much to do, not enough time, and you don’t even know what you are supposed to do in the first place.
It can be overwhelming, stressful, and frustrating, especially if you are navigating your new role alone and without the help of your manager or a mentor.
This is why learning about management and setting time aside to learn about being a good manager is vital. You do not need to set aside hours daily to do this learning.
Even if you set aside just fifteen minutes a day for four days a week, that is an hour a week that you spend learning. You can learn a lot in an hour!
There are many different ways to learn about management. You can read management books, listen to podcasts that cover management topics, and learn through mentorship or executive coaching.
3. Plan now to save time later
It can feel like there is not enough time to plan your day or schedule, but that type of thinking leads to feeling rushed and stressed when you are working.
Planning your day, projects, and goals for the next quarter and year will save you so much time later.
As a manager, you need to be forward-thinking and think of not only your work but your team’s work as well and how your team’s work fits into your organization at large. This requires effective planning, especially if planning is not one of your strong suits.
Being a manager means planning becomes more important than ever before, and not planning is a mistake new managers often make.
New managers need to think about the vision they have for their team. They need to get clear on their team’s goals and the ongoing projects and plan for how future projects will fit in.
Planning upfront lets, you think through priorities, strategies, and obstacles and confront them before they happen instead of in the middle of a project.
Planning is one of the best time management tips for new managers.
The higher you rise in an organization, the more important planning becomes.
4. Focus on results instead of being busy
Being busy is widespread, and it seems like everyone is always busy. But being busy does not necessarily produce results.
When you plan, start to plan the results you are going to create instead of the activities you will do.
For example, a result would be:
- write and submit Sarah’s review
- schedule a meeting with human resources
- submit 50 lines of code to project
These results scheduled as activities instead would look like this:
- work on writing my team’s reviews
- talking about how you need to schedule that meeting with human resources
- working on your code
When you schedule results on your calendar, you have a clear outcome that you are going to accomplish. This helps keep you focused on the results that you want to produce instead of feeling productive but being busy not moving projects forward. You become much more efficient at work which is important because as a new manager you will have a lot more work on your plate so learning how to manage your time in a way that works for you will help lessen the stress that you feel.
If you want to learn more about how to change how you are thinking and planning, you can download my free guide, 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.
5. Learn how to get work done through other people
This is the biggest shift for new managers to make when it comes to getting work done. You are no longer the one who is doing all the work. Instead, you must learn how to work through others.
This can often be a hard shift to make, especially since you probably got promoted to manager because you are a skilled and efficient worker. It seems like it would be easier for you to just step in and fix the problem or do other’s work for them because you are faster, you know how to do it better, etc.
As a new manager, you must learn to work through others.
While this doesn’t sound hard as a task, it can be a lot harder to let go than people initially realize. It sounds very easy to work through other people but the reality is much harder.
This is an emotional process and it can take a lot of inner work to become the person who can let go of control and grow into someone who lets people do things in their own way. This is why coaching can be so valuable at this time in your career, you have someone who is there to listen to you, validate you and work through the difficult emotions that these new situations may bring up.
A Final Note
These are five time management tips for new managers. Implementing these strategies as soon as you become a new manager will help your transition so much.