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The current job market may be a candidate’s dream, but for recruiters, it’s creating a growing workload and a potential time management nightmare. There are more openings to fill, more candidates to meet with, and more requests — and demands — to sort through. A shortage of recruiters makes matters even worse, as talent acquisition specialists scramble to wear multiple hats with short staffs themselves.

So what do you do when you’re overwhelmed with tasks? Working more hours isn’t the answer. Not only can working too many hours make you less productive, but it would take a toll on your personal life and well-being. A better solution is making better use of the time you’re spending at work now. 

That means determining which tasks to plunge right into, which ones to delay, and which ones to set aside. “Understanding the process of prioritizing tasks can help you get through your never-ending to-do list,” says Beate Chelette, a leadership strategist in Los Angeles. Time management is equally important. If you’re spending too much time on low-priority tasks, you’ll never finish the assignments that yield the best results.

While there’s no way to add more hours to the day, these prioritization strategies and time management techniques can help recruiters — and anyone else — get more important work done in the time they have.

There is no one-size-fits-all time management strategy

At the heart of coming up with a prioritization strategy is a method for determining what tasks to tackle first. While the following strategies take somewhat different approaches, one or two may resonate with you.

1. Keep the daily to-do list short 

If there are 20 items on your to-do list, you already know you can’t get to all of them in one day.  Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, recommends using the Most Important Tasks (MIT) methodology to whittle down your list. 

Pick no more than three tasks from your to-do list that you will focus on that day. Choose the activities that will have the greatest impact on your most important goals. To identify those tasks, John suggests asking yourself, “What are the things that would make a huge difference if I got them done today?” 

For example, if your most pressing duty is to fill three key positions, you might spend your day compiling job requirements, writing job descriptions, and screening candidates. Sourcing candidates for future openings may be a task you schedule for another day.

2. Remember everything is not urgent

When you have demands coming in from every direction, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking every request must be handled at once. The Eisenhower Matrix, coined by and named after former President Dwight Eisenhower, helps you correct that line of thinking. 

Using this strategy, you should categorize tasks like this: 

If a task is urgent and important, do it first. If a task is important but not urgent, schedule it for later. If a task is urgent but not that important, delegate it or outsource it. If the task is not urgent and not important, don’t do it at all. 

 Joe Capel, a senior operations manager for Amazon, says he has used the Eisenhower Matrix to train every team he’s led. “Great tool that helps to put things in perspective and manage time more effectively,” Joe adds.

3. Give your tasks a grade

With the ABC Method, author Alan Lakein suggests measuring a task’s importance and giving it a corresponding grade.

Tasks with pressing deadlines or deemed very important to the organization score an A.  Tasks that are important in the long run but not immediately would score a B.  Tasks that would be helpful to do but would make little difference in achieving your biggest goals would score a C. 

The biggest part of your day should be spent working on — and finishing — A tasks. Once they’re complete you move on to B tasks. C tasks should be scheduled for when you have time and are not bogged down by the A and B tasks. 

So if crafting 30 InMails to connect with potential candidates is your A task for the day, start there and don’t jump to your B tasks until you are done. 

4. Let your strengths lead your efforts

Another strategy for prioritizing your to-do list is the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principal, which says that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts. Identify which of your activities generate the most profits, build the most customer satisfaction, or contribute to whatever metric is most important to you. Then do those tasks first.

If your recruiting superpower is discovering impressive candidates where others failed to look, then sourcing tasks should often be at the top of your list. 

5. Put the company — or yourself — first

Some projects — such as spearheading the CEO’s succession plan — have the potential to be transformative for your career or for the company. Tasks associated with those projects should be at the top of your to-do list, according to the LinkedIn Learning course How to Set Goals When Everything Feels Like a Priority. Instructor Dorie Clark, a business professor at Duke and Columbia, says focusing on tasks that can either improve the way the company does business or herald in your next promotion is the way to go if you want to follow a growth and impact strategy .  

Time management allows you to tackle your priority tasks  

These tips can help you maximize the time you have. 

6. Get control over email 

A constant inundation of emails can suck up unexpected time in the most organized person’s day. Author and leadership coach Dave Crenshaw recommends scheduling certain times in your day when you focus on it and deleting or archiving every message once you read it unless you have to send a response. Of course, that means you’re not focusing on email at other hours of the day.

But what if you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your in-box that you’ll never find time to sort through? In his LinkedIn Learning course Time Management Tips, Dave provides this solution: Find a day in the past and declare “email bankruptcy” as of that date. Then archive all emails that are older than the day you picked. That frees up your inbox and you’ll still have all of those emails stored away in the unlikely case there is something you need.

7. Identify your time-wasters

A popular piece of budgeting advice is to write down where your money is currently going. The same advice can apply to time. Before you overhaul your day, create a pie chart that shows in detail how you’re spending your days now, suggests Arianna Huffington in her LinkedIn Learning course Arianna Huffington’s Thrive 03: Setting Priorities and Letting Go. You may find that you’re wasting two hours a week sorting through unimportant emails when an app can sort your email for you. By freeing yourself of those tasks, you create room for more important ones. 

8. Set your time limits

Getting caught up in a project for three hours can make you feel productive — unless it keeps you from working on an equally important assignment. Time blocking is a strategy in which you create time allotments for all of the tasks you’ve prioritized for that day. 

When determining the length of a time block, ask yourself questions like: “How long can I work before needing a break?” and “How much deep work is involved in this task?” For example, you might allot a bigger time block for working on a recruitment report than you would for creating recruitment posts for social media. But here’s the key to making this time management strategy work: When the allotted time has passed, you must stop working on that task and move on to the next.

Tasks that can disrupt your day such as responding to emails and returning phone calls should be dealt with in batches. For example, schedule 30 minutes to return emails that aren’t urgent. Also, don’t forget to block out time for breaks and to recharge.

9. Leverage a timer

The Pomodoro Technique is a popular way to tackle a to-do list while working in 25-minute intervals. Created by software designer Francesco Cirillo when he was in college, the technique refers to each 25-minute work interval as a “pomodoro,” the Italian word for tomato, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he was using when he developed this approach.

Set a timer for 25 minutes. During that time, work on a priority task until the timer goes off. Once you’ve finished a pomodoro, take a five-minute break. After four pomodoros, take a longer 15-30 minute break. 

If you have multiple short tasks that can be done in one pomodoro, batch them together. Also, if you’re finding that a task takes up more than four pomodoros, break it down into smaller tasks so you can see that you are moving forward on your projects.

“Setting timers has made me more productive,” says Phyllis Njoroge, a customer growth product manager and speaker in San Francisco. “If you really want to take your productivity-by-timers game up, check out the pomodoro technique, which is about using several intervals of timers to get through an assignment.”

10. Do what’s quick and easy now

If a candidate has a question that will take you one-minute to respond to in a quick phone call, do it immediately. That’s the premise behind the One-Minute Rule, which is credited to happiness expert and author Gretchen Rubin. Procrastinating on tasks that will take a minute to do will simply add to your to-do list and keep you buried beneath a pile of work. As you quickly check those one-minute tasks off your list, you won’t have to spend time scheduling them or energy thinking about them.

There will always be another candidate to screen, job to fill, and phone call to return. But with the right prioritization and time management strategies in place, you’ll be able to pare down your to-do list and have a social life to boot.

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