7 ways to stay organized as a project manager
What is the meaning of organization? Organization is the ability to effectively manage your time and tasks in ways that help you accomplish your goal. It is a skill that is learned and masterred overtime. A study have shown that highly organised people always complete their daily to-dos without beign stresed or depressed. It is an important skill a project manager must exhibit to be successful.
As a project manager, you can be having multiple buzzes and distractions all through the day. If you are not careful, you can spend the whole day without being able to accomplish anything reasonable. Moreso, a lot of people depends on you for information, artifacts, reports, etc. So being organized as a PM goes a long way in defining how well you discharge your duties.
Below are 10 tips to staying organized as a project manager
1. To-Do List:
Have your daily to-do list updated at the start of each day. This will help you to stay focused on your tasks for the day. It will also be great if you can specify what time is allotted to each task and check off each completed task as the day progresses.
2. Effective prioritization and time management
As a project manager, if you do not prioritize your task properly, you may not be able to effectively use your time effectively and meet the day’s goal. By Using Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle, you can prioritize your tasks for the day in the following ways:
- Urgent and Important
- Important but Not Urgent
- Not Important but urgent
- Not Urgent Not Important
It is important that you try as much as possible to attend to urgent and important tasks first as not attending to them on time may cause issues. Also, make out time for issues that may come up. Tasks that are important but not urgent should also have a good chunk of your day’s schedule so they don’t creep into the Important and Urgent quadrant. Do not hesitate to delegate tasks that fall under Not important but urgent as this will help you free up time for more important activities during your work day. As for tasks that fall under Not important not Urgent, I will advise you to dump them as they are not worthy of your time. Also to mention, learn to say no to some requests where possible as you will never be able to please everyone no matter how hard you try.
3. Shedule all meetings and activities on your calendar
This is a very important aspect of a project management. Ensure to block your calender for meetings and your daily tasks. Even a one-on-one meetings should be planned ahead and scheduled. Imagine a day well planned out and well followed. You will see how fast you will accomplish your goals for the day and be more fulfilled and happy. I have been practicing this and it does work. It will help you leave your work desk when you should and yet accomplishing much more.
4. Use project management software
There are tons o project management softwares than can make your work easier through the project phases. Gone are the days when Exel are used for tracking project activities. These days we have more real time tools e’g Asana, Jira, etc, for tracking project activities. Microsoft project, Primevera, etc, are used for workbreakdown stucture, budget and schedule tracking. You can access these tools online from anywhere which makes it even much more effective for managing your projects.
5. Plan well and track with the plan
Many project managers have failed in this area. To be an organised project manager, you must be able to plan and track progress with plan baseline. This enables you to see on time when things are deviating and be able to take corrective actions where necessary.
6. Communicate right:
As a project manager, comunication is one skill you must have. Now how do you comunicate right? By sharing the right and necessary information with the right stakeholder, at the right time. Your team must know the goal they are working to accomplish and understand deadlines and know where they are per time. The project sponsors also, should be provided with reports and all necessary information the right time so are all other stakeholders of the project. Not communicating right may cause damages as well as make you seem incompetence in your role
7. Organize your work Files:
Work files can be hard or soft copies. Although, these days, it is more of softcopies due to the age and time. It is very imortant that you create folders per project and carefully place files in their respective project folders. It can be frustrating and stressful to search for a file on the computer for hours. Even email inbox can be well organised to make it easy to locate emails pertaining each project.
