How to Manage Your Time as a Restaurant Manager

One of the most interesting and yet rather hectic roles to occupy in a restaurant is that of the restaurant manager.

As a manager, you essentially have to take on multiple roles regarding everything in the company, which can prove to be quite time-consuming, and, as you'd imagine, stressful.

This is primarily because it is your responsibility to oversee the day-to-day running and operations of the restaurant in addition to supervising all of your employees.

These responsibilities often expand in shopping around for the best vendors for your inventory, as well as ensuring that all employees are actively working and striving to uphold the reputation and integrity of the restaurant.

With all of these tasks sitting on the shoulders of management, it becomes challenging to manage one of the essential factors in a day time.

Managing time becomes quite difficult for restaurant managers because of the multiple tasks that must be tended to every single day. From overseeing food quality to ensuring the effective functioning of every team member, there is always much to do every hour of every day.

With several tasks to complete on a given day, it might seem impossible to get them all done within a 24-hour span, which is why we're here to offer a helping hand.

Here are a few tips on how best to manage your time as a manager in the restaurant industry.

Delegate Duties

This is an essential aspect of management that most restaurant managers fail to recognize.

At times, it may often feel that "if you want it done right, then do it yourself," as you want to avoid disappointment for faulty work. However, the best solution is not to continue to overwhelm yourself but instead learn to delegate responsibilities and duties to your employees better.

Meetings are essential, especially the ones you have with your employees regularly for evaluation purposes; however, you can reduce these meetings to once a week or when you feel it to be most necessary.

You can also delegate the duties to qualified staff members. This will free up your time so you can tend to sales calls, which can come from vendors and purveyors.

By dividing tasks among trusted employees, you can also have members on your team look into various aspects, such as customer feedback, quality assurance, food quality, and inventory.

After the tasks have been completed, request a report from your employees that the tasks were assigned to summarizing what was done and how long it took to finish.

Delegating duties will not only help you manage your time effectively, but it will also ensure more productivity.

If you put other individuals in charge of handling tasks, you will promote a healthy sense of leadership within your team, as well as free up your time at work to focus on other important duties at hand.

Set a Scale of Preference

One of the best tricks that managers can apply is to set a scale of preference.

When confronted with stress from work, you may find yourself waking up every day to the surge of mental agony that is a result of the previous day's work that has not yet been completed in addition to the current day's challenges that must soon be taken on.

The weighted pressure alone can cause you to lose focus and ultimately negatively affect productivity.

The reality and outcome become very different when you have a scale of preference in place because setting every task according to priority ensures that the most important tasks are completed on time.

Start by highlighting your goals, then, through careful analysis, you can then pick the ones that are most pressing and place them accordingly on top of the list, while you save the other undertakings for a different day or time.

You can then approach the day one step at a time. This will help you manage your time wisely, yield the best results, and achieve more within a short period.

Assign a Timeline to Every Designated Task

This is another great way to save you from the stress and disappointment associated with time wastage in the restaurant.

There are different tasks you have to look into like inspecting the quality of food to ensuring that every member of your team is working with a sense of urgency; it becomes better when you learn to attach a particular timeframe to every task.

The creation of scheduling software has also made time management easier.

This means you do not have to worry yourself about manually keeping track of your employees' hours worked or dedicating as much time to schedule them.

With the amount of time saved from automated employee scheduling, it is now easier for every member of your team to access his or her weekly/monthly schedule from his or her desktop or mobile device.

Take Breaks

This point at first glance might seem impossible, especially when weathered by a list of never-ending assignments, but until you consider the upside of taking a break, you will never know how important it can prove to be.

Designate specific times of the day to step away and temporarily shift your gaze away from work.

Taking a break helps the mind relax, resulting in increased brain functioning when you get back to work. This means you can achieve more within a short time if you learn to take breaks periodically.

You will soon learn to realize other ways of approaching tasks that previously would have taken hours to complete.

There could even be easier ways of achieving seemingly difficult tasks, such as having to develop new restaurant marketing strategies. Still, you might not just see this unless you take a break.

Every restaurant manager needs to make it an intentional habit of taking a break.

The Takeaway

Restaurant management is a very exciting and diverse lucrative job, as it allows you to explore several aspects of management, from staffing to quality assurance, and even creative development of new marketing strategies.

However, without effective time management, you might not be able to accomplish the tasks placed before you and likely wear out within a short period of time.

Effective time management yields the best results, so ensure that you are following the best practices to achieve your daily goals and tasks.