7 tips to boost your time management skills when building a website

Credit: Robert Mathers

When working on a website, it is common to face a rush of high-priority tasks and it is easy to feel a little overwhelmed.

The best way to stay productive and stress-free in these situations is through proactive time management skills.

Here are our top tips for planning your time when building websites so you can take a methodical approach to maximising your productivity.

1. Create To-Do-Lists

To-Do-Lists are really effective for making sure you’re on track with each stage of your project. Beyond jotting down your tasks, use a system to break up items into top priority, mid-level priority and low priority categories based on how crucial the action is and when it needs to be completed by.

These lists help to show a wider view of the website you are working on, give you a record of what you have already done and make you less likely to forget key tasks even if they do not need immediate action. There are many excellent online task list tools to help you make the process even easier. Examples include TeuxDeux, HiTask, Remember the Milk and Todoist.

2. Use down-time to your advantage

Even when you’re busy building websites, there are periods of time during the day when you have the opportunity to come up with new ideas about how to produce better results and get pages finished more quickly. Whenever you are walking somewhere, driving, travelling on public transport, showering and so on, you have time to consider the details of the project and develop further approaches to help you perform more efficiently.

Down-time also gives you space to unclutter your mind and this makes it much easier to envision the website as a whole and make better overall decisions. Try carrying a notepad and pen during these times so you can write any ideas down as they come to you.

3. Focus on the task at hand

Working on one website from start to finish makes it easier to streamline your work. We can often be tempted to work on different projects simultaneously but this is likely to take more time because you have to remind yourself of the finer details of each task when you return to it and immerse yourself to resolve any issues you encounter.

There is also a variety of potential distractions that are best avoided if you are working to finish a website on a tight deadline. These can include social media, surfing the web, personal email, unexpected requests and personal calls. Although it can be difficult to keep your concentration when you encounter these distractions, you will have a much better chance of getting the website finished on time.

4. Distribute the workload

Projects can often require much more work than we had anticipated and this is why, if you work in a team, delegating small tasks to others, like image editing and acquiring relevant content, will help you meet your deadlines.

Delegating tasks does not have to be a negative thing and can provide great benefits for those you delegate to as well as yourself. When people receive small projects they have the opportunity to develop and enhance their skills and to learn about the larger task that you are carrying out.

Even if you are working on a website by yourself there are plenty of online apps that can help to speed things up and take care of jobs for you.

For example, try Privacy Policy Generator if you need to create professional privacy policies for websites. Launchlist is another great tool that helps you check your work before launching a project.

CSS3 Generator and HTML2 Canvas are also available to make the coding process quicker and there is Colour Scheme Designer 3 to help you develop colour combinations as well.

5. Make a log of your time

This is an excellent way to get a clear picture of how you spend your time and to identify periods in which you can be more productive. Use time-tracking applications, such as Harvest, TimeSheet or ManicTime, to make a note of everything that you do during a typical week.

Give this a try; you may see ways in which you can merge tasks together to save time or find a few vacant periods that can be used to complete smaller tasks.

6. Set realistic deadlines

There are potential issues with setting deadlines that are too soon, too far in the future and not setting deadlines at all. If you don’t give yourself long enough to finish set tasks, this can result in making you stressed out and over-worked, negatively impacting your ability to produce high-quality websites.

Having a deadline that is much further in the future than is needed can create problems because there may be less of an incentive to perform at your best and you will often be losing time that could be used more effectively on different projects.

Even worse is not setting a deadline at all, because you don’t have a target to aim for and this can make your work less structured and focused.
To get a decent balance, carefully consider how long building a site will take based on the information you have and allow yourself a reasonable cushion of extra time in case any issues present themselves.

7. Develop routines

Getting into routines when you’re working can make it much easier to manage your time. Using the information from making a time log, it should be quite simple to group together certain types of tasks that you regularly undertake when building a website, such as coding, launching the site and adding extra resources.

Creating routine actions for these means that you will be able to speed up these processes over time and plan to complete crucial items at the times when you are most effective.
We hope that you have enjoyed this article and that you can use these methods and tools to reflect on how you are currently managing your time when building websites and identify ways in which you can optimise your productivity
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What are your top tips for managing your time when building a website?
Let us know in the comments below.

For more information about building a website or if you would like to hire an expert designer, please contact us.

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Credit: Robert Mathers