3 Productivity Hacks for Project Managers

Being a project manager is a balancing act. You constantly shuffle priorities, collect feedback, analyze stakeholder, customer and user needs and manage timely collaboration while maintaining day-to-day operations and project delivery. With so much at stake and on your plate, wouldn’t it be better to find ways to be more efficient and streamline your processes so you have more time for what’s important, be more creative, and get things done on time? project deadlines and on schedule?

Here are three productivity hacks you might want to try and incorporate into your workflow:

The two minute rule

Have you ever found yourself looking back at your calendar at the end of a work day, wondering how so many little things piled up to the point where you now have a huge workload to catch up on before the next day? How about trying the two minute rule? With the two-minute rule, you ask yourself, “What task can be completed in a very short time with minimal effort (in two minutes).

This could be as simple as sending a quick reply to an email, adding a new update to a project tool, sending a reminder to someone on your project team, or scheduling your next meeting. Knock off those two-minute tasks first before they pile up, and you’ll be more productive with fewer tasks carried over to the next day or work week.

Time block

Time-blocking is an effective time management strategy that involves segmenting parts of your day for specific tasks. Look at your work week and block out times for repetitive tasks such as meetings at specific times that are non-negotiable or cannot be moved. Work around these time frames and block off your day into 30-minute or one-hour chunks, allocating each chunk to a specific task or project. This is especially useful if you manage a portfolio and need to split your work day and week evenly to ensure that every project in the portfolio is on track.

To make this even more useful, you could color-code each block according to project difficulty or task type, so that when glancing at your calendar, it’s easy to note where specific groupings of tasks are.

Single Source of Truth

A single source of truth is a central repository or system that houses all of your project information, such as contracts and agreements, requirements, SOWs (scope of work), meeting notes, KPIs and schedules, guidelines, stakeholder communication plans, and standards. You can use a project management tool for this, or even use a secure OneDrive folder in SharePoint to host this information and provide different levels of access to your project team.

This helps eliminate any confusion or misunderstandings that lead to project delays later, and is especially helpful for situations where you may not always be available, such as if you are away on PTO, sick, or on maternity leave.

Using these three productivity strategies will help you be more efficient at work and reduce unnecessary stress or project delays. But don’t practice these hacks just for yourself. Encourage your team members to adopt some of these strategies to boost their productivity as well, contributing to less stress at work and a more engaged team with enhanced well-being.