How to Self-Manage in the Workplace

Every worker needs to have self-management skills. While you may already have a manager overseeing your work and ensuring that everything runs smoothly, it is still important to be able to manage yourself and your own work effectively. This is because employees with self-management skills tend to be more productive and produce greater quality work.

What are self-management skills?

Self-management skills are the abilities to make an employee feel productive regardless of the working environment. Self-management skills can come in multiple forms, such as initiation, organisation, problem solving, time management, and communication.

Tips for improving self-management at work

Use a planner

A planner is an item that is often recommended by many to use, but in reality, most people do not use planners to their full potential. A planner is an effective way to keep track of all upcoming events and deadlines, and is therefore a key item to improving organisation.

Prioritise tasks

Your everyday to-do list may be filled to the brim with tasks, or your list may be changing every day. Either way, you would need to know how to prioritise your responsibilities in order to deliver the best body of work in any given circumstances. So this means focusing attention on the most important jobs, or the jobs that needs to be done urgently, rather than minor distractions.

Practice stress-management

In order to deliver consistently good quality work, you will need to know how to manage yourself regardless of the working condition. There may be times where the working conditions may not be ideal for productive work, such as a stressful time period where deadlines are near, or a critical issue has risen, or your personal life is distracting you. However, for you to work at an optimal level, it is recommended to practice stress-management so your emotions will not override your work.

Evaluate yourself

Objectively evaluating your progress will help you immensely in achieving good self-management skills. Keep a record of the tasks you managed to accomplish and the quality of them. Did you manage to complete all of the tasks you had originally planned to? Were the quality of those tasks up to the standard you wanted? If the answer is no, then make sure to review how you worked and come up with ways to remedy the issues. Moreover, you can also ask for someone else’s review to ensure that you are not subjective about your progress. The reviewer can also give different ideas and perspectives on how you can continue to improve.