The 13 Time Management Secrets of Successful Project Managers

Project managers have many tasks to juggle, and they’re accountable for exceptional time management skills to complete projects on time. Accordingly, one of their most important responsibilities is effectively managing their time, so they can cover their most important priorities and meet all their deadlines.

What do successful project managers do differently? And how can you learn from them?

The Value of Project Managers

Project managers are indispensable for a wide variety of projects, including web development projects. Typically, they must work with a variety of people in order to accomplish a series of specific objectives.

For example, in web project development, the project manager will usually work with clients, designers, developers, and testers.

Over the course of several weeks, the project manager will be responsible for making sure the overall project stays on track, hitting each milestone within a given time frame and at an acceptable level of quality or completeness.

One of the interesting qualities of a project manager is that they’re responsible for time management in two different capacities. First, they must manage their own time. Project managers have a number of individual responsibilities and tasks to complete and a finite amount of time in each day, so they need to be prudent about how they spend their time. Second, they must manage external resources and other people in a way that allows them to manage their time more effectively.

Obviously, each individual in the context of a given project is going to be responsible for managing their own time. But project managers are, at the highest level, responsible for allocating resources and coordinating people to ensure that time is managed and allocated properly.

Time Management Secrets of Successful Project Managers

These are the time management secrets of successful project managers:

1. They use the right platforms.

Project management platforms come in many varieties, and some are better than others, with more features, better organizational tools, a smoother flow, and more intuitive usability. Of course, there’s an element of subjectivity here; not all project managers are going to agree on what constitutes a good platform. However, almost all effective project managers share a discerning nature when it comes to choosing this centralized source of truth.

2. They understand deadlines in context.

Project managers often have to work backward, starting with a deadline and figuring out how to manage time as that deadline approaches. One of the most important strategies for doing this effectively is understanding deadlines in context.

For example, there might be a deadline to produce design comps for a website within three weeks, but the context here is that developers will need approved comps to start critical development processes immediately after this deadline. This means adhering to the design comp deadline is essential for the project to keep moving forward, and therefore may need to take higher priority over other, less important or more flexible deadlines.

This aspect of critical thinking is crucial for project managers to manage time appropriately in the pursuit of high-level goals.

3. They use priority hierarchies.

In line with this, most project managers use some kind of priority hierarchy or matrix to help them decide between competing priorities in direct conflict with each other.

For example, the “Eisenhower matrix” is a commonly used hierarchy matrix that can establish priority levels based on both urgency and importance. What’s important is that a project manager has some consistent method of evaluating priority level, so they can use it across many different contexts and in a repeatable way. When there are two seemingly equally important tasks to complete, and only enough time to complete one of them, this framework can help project managers choose one over the other.

4. They anticipate issues.

Problems inevitably arise in any sufficiently complicated project to be managed and executed. The difference between successful and unsuccessful project managers is in how they approach these inevitable problems. Good time management requires you to not only respond to issues in a time-efficient manner, but to also anticipate those issues so you have time to prepare for them and have the foresight to account for them.

As a simple example, skilled project managers sometimes build a few extra days into a timeline to account for any issues that might come up in the meantime.

5. They start from the high level.

When relaying directives, project managers start from the high level. They understand that in order to be successful as a team, each individual in the team needs to understand the context of what they’re doing. That doesn’t mean every individual team member needs to be fully educated on every aspect of the project, but they should have a thorough understanding of their role and their context within that project.

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