In a marketing agency such as HD, where new and unplanned tasks pop up daily, and with all the creative chaos around, it’s sometimes challenging to stay focused and follow through with your plan. But we have someone who always tracks all our efforts, writes down pain points, and offers solutions and strategies to overcome them – our HR Jovana Kovač!
The end of the year is overwhelming, and the end-of-the-year chaos always starts with the first week in December. That’s why this week, when we felt like we were drowning in all the notifications and tasks in Teamwork, she jumped in to help us with the best strategies for time management and task prioritization.
We all know that time management and prioritizing tasks is often easier said than done.
And when you work in a flat hierarchy where all the responsibility is yours, knowing strategies to plan your activities, delegate, and say “no” is critical to effectiveness and productivity. That’s why Jovana showed us how to improve our time management skills and get all our tasks done to the best of our abilities.
As Jovana explained, someone has a problem with effective time management if they spend all day “running around putting out fires” in order to get all tasks done, suffer from procrastination, and have a hard time saying “no” when asked to do something.
One of the time management strategies we liked best is the Eisenhower Matrix. It can help you sort out your commitments, weed out the less urgent and important tasks on your list, delegate or not do the unimportant ones, and finally make sure that only important and urgent matters end up on your desk.
This Important-Urgent Matrix is described in the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and that is exactly what we are aiming for here at HD.
In addition to prioritizing our tasks, Jovana gives us useful and proven tips on how to avoid distractions, measure our progress, and set a limit on the amount of work we are willing to accept. We not only found this workshop useful, but also had the opportunity to hear others’ problems, struggles, and overcomes and to discuss together how we can best improve our internal organization
All in all, Jovana once again helped us understand each other, reduce stress and improve our productivity and work-life balance.
Mr. Treublaan 7
1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands