Through our Institute for Engineering Career Development, I have worked with many engineers on a one-on-one basis providing Engineering Management Instituteing and guidance, and the two things that almost all of our members ask for help with are time management and work-family balance. Hence in this post I am going to share with you one very effective tool that can immediately help you in your efforts to better manage your time and give you the opportunity to spend some more time with your family away from the office.
First of all, we’re all engineers here (at least most of our readers are – if you’re not this post will most likely still be helpful), so let’s break this problem down. Managing your time isn’t necessarily a realistic solution – what does it even mean anyway? If you don’t have staff to delegate tasks to, like many engineers don’t, you are always going to have X amount of work to do in Y amount of time, right? Let’s say you want to fix the amount of time that you work to 40 hours per week (as some of you start to laugh at that number), let that be equal to Y. X, the amount of work to be done, will be variable but for most engineers who have time management challenges, X is a good amount of work. So really, the only solution in my mind, is to do as much work as possible in Y amount of time. Now you are reading this going, duhhh, that’s obvious. But I ask you, is it? Are you being as productive as you can be in those 40 hours a week or whatever amount of time you designate for Y? [Read more…] about An Effective To-Do List Can Both Increase Productivity and Reduce Hours Worked in Your Engineering Career