Effective time management skills provide a competitive advantage for any finance professional who's looking to become more productive and increase their quality time away from work. The world of finance has evolved into a highly competitive workplace. Both productivity and refreshing downtime can be key.

The Black Hole

Various time-wasters can suck down productivity. Finance professionals are perpetually tempted to multitask. Maybe you're an advisor and you manage to accomplish the fꦗollowing betw🐭een 8:30 and 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning:

• You work on a spreadsheet.
• You stop after being interrupted by two new email messages.
• You send off six emails in a row.
• You check out a college friend's wedding pictures on Instagram.
• You accept a company social outing invitation via a Slack message.
• You field two unexpected calls from prospective clients.
• You're forced to hang up abruptly because your manager stops by to remind you that you're five minutes late for the staff meeting.

You're probably in the lowest-performing tier compared to your peers if this sounds like you, particularly if you work in a cutthroat corporate environment like a 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:private equity firm or 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:investment bank.

No one will remember, care about, or promote you for all the busy work you've accomplished five or 10 years from now. Your organization values necessary work and masterpieces.

Planning Ahead

Finish your upcoming week's "to do" list every Sunday afternoon, preferably using an application or web service that syncs across all of your devices. Highlight the items that are critical to your success at work and in your personal life as well. The things that aren't highlighted are probably those that you can delegate, delay, or avoid altogether.

Critical deliverables in finance include reports or research that must be accurate and submitted before a deadline. Your organization is served better if you focus on improving the quality of these reports rather than merely doing a decent job on them so you can free up time for non-key items like answering low-priority emails or taking part in a🉐 long-winded meeting.

Finish listing the next day's action items 10 minutes before leaving each workday and number them in order of importance and priority. Continually ask yourself about all the things that you don't really need to do, things that don't meet a certain productivity threshold.

Multitasking

Success in finance boils down to your ability to always deliver on critical and immediate deliverables. What are the crucial information and data points your finance managers rely on? What can you deliver to help your organization and/or your clients win? Does it involve the timely submission of an audit report, accurate calculations of 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:net present value on a proposed proje🍌ct, or ensur𒁏ing that the formulas on Excel lead to proper aggregate totals?

No one cares about all the emails you exchanged, the social club meetings you attended, or the chronological filing of folders in your cabinet. Multitasking constantly prevents individuals from giving tꦏheir best on the few criticﷺal deliverables that their employers expect from them. Success in finance can involve simplicity in methods of how you approach your tasks. Do the important, difficult, urgent, and highest-value action items first.

This may seem brutally simple for the well-read and uninitiated recent graduate but do one thing at a time and don't stop until it's been completed. Chop up long-term project tasks into shorter-term milestones and finish ahead of time. Doing things from start to finish eliminates costly inefficiencies because you'll avoid having to constantly start over and recalibrate on different, unrelated items.

Inbox Management

Your inbox is a major time-waster. You're sporadically filling your day with garbage information if a majority of your emails are irrelevant to your immediate tasks at hand. You can avoid this by taking a few steps.

• Set predetermined times for checking your email and check your inbox no more than three or four times per day.
• Create an after-hours folder for emails that you should get to but aren't urgent. This folder can be particularly helpful to let you get back to important requests that can wait for a few business days before receiving a response from you.
• Send only the most critical emails during your workday. It's important to stay updated within your group but a major chunk of your time can be wasted by inexperienced or less disciplined colleagues who flood your inbox with irrelevant messages. You can reduce these types of emails by not responding to those that aren't work-related.
• Empty your inbox before you leave work. Create project-related folders where you can park emails that are related to specific problems. Keeping your inbox empty saves you time by eliminating non-core messages. Place them in an urgent folder if there are items that absolutely require attention within the next few hours or by the next day.

Other Time-Saving Tips

How Much Time Do You Waste?

Create a simple spreadsheet that allows you to enter the estimated time you've wasted on trivial matters. Do this daily. You'll be training yourself to recognize unimportant matters as you encounter them if you develop and maintain this habit.

Process Paper Documents Once

You can file them, submit them, or get rid of them after they're processed.

Direct-Message Your Colleagues

Walking around your office or between departments can cost you a few hours per week and we know how costly that is on an annualized basis. Using direct messages through a corporate messaging system or approved web service is often a more efficient way to quickly get answers to a variety of questions unless it's an important or complicated matter.

Know Where Everything Is

Don't waste your time searching for things if you value your minutes and hours.

Separate Your Tasks

1. Urgent and important: This includes financial and accounting reports with strict and approaching deadlines.
2. Not urgent and important: These include networking within your finance group and training classes.
3. Urgent and not important: Think sporadic messages from your inbox and "sign up due dates" for club meetings.
4. Not urgent and not important: This would be those 10-minute conversations by the vending machine and checking fantasy football scores.

You should obviously spend a𝔍s much of your day as possible on the first category.

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate

Delegating will separate you from the pack as you move up in the organization. Handle tasks that only you can execute. You'll soon have direct reports assigned to you as you hone your time-management skills. Assign out tasks that you don't have to handle yourself. Only do the things that absolutely require your attention or expertise.

Don't Manage Out Your Personality

Finance professionals should possess time management skills but they also need rapport and goodwill with internal colleagues and the external community. Focusing exclusively on time can make you appear abrasive and this will put off a lot of people in both social and business settings. You'll start thinking that you're the time management guru if you're not careful, totally unaware of the "social idiot" stamp on your forehead.

Communication, leadership, and business development skills are just as important as time management skills. Time management skills alone won't be sufficient to help them to reach the next level as finance professionals move up in their careers.

The Bottom Line

You value your time if you value your life. Your work life is a sub-component of the larger picture. The level of contribution and service you can provide to others depends on your ability to make the most of the finite amount of time allocated to you. It's the important things your employer expects you to deliver that count. They won't care much about everything else and neither should you.