Working within the events industry can sometimes take its toll on an individual. From attending networking events, workshops, live shows, meetings with agencies and publications, to managing the day to day of your job role can be very pressurised, if your day is not planned correctly.
The importance of time management and prioritising your workload is something we all wish we had skills in, as we all know no working day is ever the same. By putting a plan in place and ensuring you stick to it, you can easily take this load off.
Time Management:
Time is a key factor when working in any industry – time management is all about making sure you have enough time to do all of your tasks throughout the day, as well as doing things outside of your working life, like going to the gym, or socialising with friends. Creating a ‘to do list’ is probably the easiest and efficient forms of planning to enable that you are using your time effectively. Below are some tips of things can you implement to improve your time management:
- Set yourself targets – “I will complete X and Y by this time, in order to complete Z by a certain time.”
- Plan in advance – do your research, make those important phone calls, write that content – know what you want to achieve and plan this around your deadline.
- If you have been given more workload than what you can manage, it is okay to say you are working to a tight deadline, and explain your workload level, of which you can then evaluate if you can pick up and complete at a different time.
Prioritising Workload:
Prioritising your work can indeed be difficult, especially if you have more than one deadline to meet at one given time. Again, incorporating some factors of time management into the mix, and knowing what tasks need to be done first in order to achieve that deadline will help prioritise your work.
Not prioritising can indeed add stress to your work life, and make you feel some what anxious, as the pressure of not putting things in order of priority can make you feel this way. Take a look at some tips to use to help make this easy for you:
- Write down in order of priority the tasks you need to complete (this can be a daily or weekly list) and use a colourful pen to tick off your list once you have completed each task.
- Give yourself enough time. I know we can’t help when things come in last minute, but if you have an event or a project you are working on and the deadline is due in a week’s time, get it done and out the way – that way you can work on something else.
- If you are easily distracted, put some headphones in, play some upbeat music and get your tasks complete!
I always hear stories of people saying that they work better under pressure, of which I’m sure people do, however, why stress, be panicked and have that anxious feeling over you when you can plan ahead of time, create a to do list and get the job done!
Author
Alisha Tyrell-Wood – Project Manager at drp
