Why is time management an important skill for instructional designer?

Time management and personal organization are soft skills, which are unfairly neglected at the expense of hard skills. It is because soft skills will not provide you with a new job, while hard ones will certainly. However, if you completely neglect the development of soft skills, you may not be able to understand the client, the superior, you may not be able to organize yourself properly, you may be late, you will do your job chaotically, etc.

This is exactly the reason why you should constantly working on improving your time management skills. Because it will allow you to do your job more productively, with better quality, faster, and it will also allow you to have more free time. Not to mention that your stress level will be greatly reduced thanks to a job well done and a clear balance between private and business life.

The list of responsibilities of one instructional designer is constantly increasing, so often instructional designers cannot achieve everything they planned to achieve. You know how much time an instructional designer job requires.

Tips for better time management

Distractor identification

Do you look at what happens on social networks a couple of times during your work? Do you respond to emails when you arrive? Maybe you have external distractors, such as noise from the street, a loud neighbor? If you recognized yourself in any of the previous sentences, you are not the only one. It happened to everyone that his motivation dropped, and that he easily turned his attention to something more interesting. To break this vicious circle of “a little work, a little fun” the first step is to identify your distractors. Okay, you may not be able to silence a loud neighbor, but you can control your actions. Set a time of day when you reply to emails and don’t open an email tab every two minutes.

Measurement and analysis of time spent

Once, for the sake of an experiment, I watched how I spent my whole week and wrote it down in a table. The process goes like this. Identify the main tasks you do during the day, turn on the timer and record the score at the end of the day. That way, you’ll know exactly where time has flown. When you know how much time you need for each task, it will be easier for you to organize your time. For easier tracking, I advise creating a unique table, with the names of activities that are specific to you. See example below.

Small web tools that can be helpful

* All listed web tools can be used in the free or freemium version.

Time Rescue – if you want to know how you spend your time online, this tool will make it possible for you. It can also make it easier for you to measure the time spent I mentioned above. This tool runs in the background of your computer, and at the end of the week you will receive a detailed report on your time spent at the computer.

Remember the Milk – this tool serves as an online reminder. You can easily add your tasks, reminders, and there is even an option to delegate a task to someone who also uses this application, so that it can also be used for project management.

Doodle – To reduce the time spent scheduling appointments, endlessly sending emails, create your work calendar and easily schedule your appointments.

Time management is a soft skill and allows instructional designer to better allocate their time working on different tasks. With the help of techniques for better organization, instructional designer can achieve more, with less time, which further leads to more free time time, better focus on work tasks, less stress… certainly the advantage of organizing time improves some other aspects in your life .