An effective HR is someone who can manage time, finish those daily, administrative tasks, and get some top priority work done. But sometimes, it’s tough. With notifications going off every few minutes, emails pouring in for leaves, and shift changes, it’s hard to ensure your workday is as productive as it can get.

Time management is a crucial skill for any successful HR. By being able to manage time wisely, cutting down on distractions and interruptions, and focusing for long periods, you can be more productive and get your tasks done in half the time.

But, time management does require a little bit of hacking. Here are five ways that you can do it!

1. Create written procedures for routine tasks

Do you have routine tasks that are cumbersome? Write down the procedure to break it down into subtasks and simplify it.

Create a procedure checklist by mentally scanning how you work through the task and laying out the sequence of events, including any blockers you may face and what you need to do to solve them. This checklist takes away the thinking for you, allowing you to get to work straight away without having to spend much time dwelling on the subtasks.

Just like a routine, a procedure checklist is highly specific and allows you to get to the action. Here’s a detailed guide to writing procedure checklists. Here, tools like Notion.so can come in really handy!

notion for creating workflow docs

2. Work on priority tasks during the start of the day

Your mornings are your most productive hours. Many studies point toward how effective it is to learn in the morning. So, it’s essential to make it a point to put your mornings aside for some deep, high-priority work.

How can you ensure your mornings go uninterrupted? Block out your early office hours in your calendar and let your team know that you are unavailable for the first few hours of the day. Schedule meetings in the second half of the day.

If your company allows you, spend your mornings working remotely, from a cafe or a closed cabinet. If you want to go a step further, you can even come to work a few hours earlier than usual and maximize those early hours, and get more done.

Also read: Four proven strategies to improve team productivity

3. Maintain a work-life balance

You may not believe it but having a work-life balance can make you better with time. By setting up time boundaries for your work, you can prepare your brain to plan your tasks for the day and prioritize any work that needs to be done before the day ends.

work life-balance

The most common advice that most successful businessmen give is this: don’t bring work home. Make it a point to keep your work aside when you’re back home. This way, your mind will take this into account and work more efficiently at the office. If not, you are likely to work on fewer priority tasks and come back home with a deadline to tackle.

4. Automate employee management with AttendanceBot

One time management tip is to be better at delegating. But, as an HR, there are specific tasks- like employee management- that just can’t be handed over to someone else. You can still make it easier to manage and monitor your employees with AttendanceBot. It’s one of the best time management and tracking software!

With this bot, your employees can punch in and out of work within the work communication platform. As an HR, you don’t need to spend any time tracking attendance or leaves. Your employees can request leaves within the app on Slack/Teams, and you can manage all these details within your communication platform itself.

employee management

AttendanceBot also allows you to manage and modify shifts quickly, replacing your manual spreadsheets that make shift management tedious.

A timesheet calculator and efficient employee scheduling – that’s all you need!

Also read: How to create a weekly work plan with your team without stressing

5. Block notifications for specific periods of time

Notifications are an attention-grabbing part of your day. The repetitive buzzing is likely to distract you constantly. One quick research even found that notifications are distracting even when you ignore them. But, we don’t need a survey to know that notifications can kill your focus at work.

That’s why it’s crucial to turn off notifications on your laptop and phone. Use apps like AppBlock to disable app notifications for certain periods of time on your phone. Slack allows you to snooze notifications and you can even turn off desktop notifications for your email and instead, allot a time slot to check your email twice a day.

Reading these time management tips is not enough. Ensure that you follow through on them immediately by setting up your processes and starting tomorrow early by tackling your heaviest task in the morning.

What hacks have you picked up to become a more effective HR?