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Time Management
The following pages provide lots of useful information and tips on how to manage your time more effectively – for a really comprehensive guide to Time Management, we offer a hands-on Time Management Training Course
The increasing pace of business life and the increasingly easy access from home to office means many people are crying out for MORE TIME!!
We can use hand held devices, on-line systems and complex activity planners, all of which will enable us to gain some control over the issue but will they solve the problem? Have you tried systems before which haven’t worked for you? Do you despair and feel a failure as you leave a pile of papers on your desk at the end of the day and an in-box full of unanswered emails?
An effective time management system will give you all of the following:
- Better results
- Less stress
- Reduction in errors and costs
- More time for thinking and planning
But unfortunately; there is NO quick fix to time management and there are NO magic solutions!!
Consider the following statement:
There will NEVER be enough hours in the day to finish all I have to do
This may not be what you want to hear but take a few seconds to let it sink in. IF it were true, how differently would you feel about yourself and your work? Would the acceptance of this truth help you to feel less stressed about the issue? Because if you are a conscientiousness manager or a committed staff member, there WILL always be something more you could have done. So accept this truth and take the first step to taking back the control and managing your time! The moment of change is at hand and once you commit to that change you are on your way to managing your time!
Time Management may be defined as:
- The effective use of time to efficiently complete daily duties and long-term projects.
- Which would you rather be efficient or effective?
- ‘Efficiency’ is doing a job correctly
- ‘Effectiveness’ is doing the correct job correctly
An image of an efficient person conjures up a picture of someone dashing about the office telling everyone how much work they have on, how many e-mails they received that morning, and how many meetings they have to attend that day! In other words they may be trying to impress with their endless list of activities. An effective person however, will be busy doing the right things in other words what matters in the job, what is important. An effective person will have prioritised their work tasks with reference to their importance and urgency.
Keeping a time log
Unless you are incredibly self-aware, you will probably not be conscious of how much time you spend on which activities during the course of a working day. How can you hope to make positive changes if you don’t know where to start?
A time log is a simple] time managment technique] to help you. You just need to note down the following on a daily basis over a typical week:
- What activities were you engaged in?
- With whom?
- How long did you spend on each?
- Which were planned activities and which were spontaneous?
At the end of the week, take time to look back and ask yourself what you learnt from this. Was there anything that surprised you? Are there things you want to change for the future?
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on October 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
Most people complain about the amount of time that is wasted at work.
Look at the list below and see if anything seems familiar!
Top twenty time wasters
- Drop-in Visitors
- Telephone interruptions
- Lack of clear authority/responsibility in my job
- Too many regular meetings and too many unscheduled meetings
- Amount of correspondence and paperwork
- Day-to-day crises
- Poor performance of staff
- Lack of co-ordination/teamwork between sections/departments
- Multiple bosses, no clear reporting relationship
- Talking with colleagues
- Report writing, report reading
- Checking that work is completed
- Involvement in minor issues
- Travelling
- Poor filing system
- Too much reading to get done
- Personal difficulty in scheduling or planning
- No clear performance measures/standards
- Unclear, indirect or ambiguous communication in the organisation
- Shifting priorities in my work
When you review this list you can see that some of the issues relate to your organisation, some to those people around you and some to you yourself. Consider your work situation and try to get clarity on the areas of time wasting you can have some control over and do something about them as soon as you can. The larger issues may take longer and involve you developing a strategy to deal with them. You can learn about how to develop these time management strategies on our 1-day Time Management training course
Ten ways to waste your OWN time
Naturally you never waste your own time, do you? It is always the fault of other people. GET AWARE and BE HONEST! Of course, we waste time on occasions; we all need ‘down time’.
Look at the list below and do a self-check.
- Reacting to circumstances rather than having a contingency plan
- Doing unproductive things from sheer habit
- Leaving jobs unfinished for no particular reason.
- Being easily diverted from your objectives by the demands of others
- Planning less important but attractive tasks before important ones.
- Doing tasks which could be delegated.
- Persisting with projects which are clearly not working out
- Trying to work out what your boss meant rather than getting it clear in the first place
- Doing things that are not actually part of your job
- Having an “open door” policy.
There will be times when some of these ‘activities’ can be legitimate but be careful not to go too far!
time management strategies
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on October 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
To be effective in your work means doing the right things (effectiveness) in the right way (efficiency); this involves being clear about the key result areas of your job and the precise outputs required. Planning is central to time management, but it is not the first step. You must first know what it is you are planning. What is your work or, more correctly, what should your work be? If you are to plan you must plan to do the right things. Learn how to achieve key results in time management on our 1-day Time Management Course
What are Key Result Areas?
These are the major overall things your organisation expects you to achieve. In other words, your purpose or why I am here. They may be reflected in your job description; they may be given to you as objectives or targets. You may have your own professional/personal result areas too.
Once you are clear on your Key Result Areas, you can go to plan your work practices more efficiently as all of your objectives should relate back to them. This means that you will never again be involved in activities that are outside the scope of your job and, therefore, a waste of your time!
Make a list of your key result areas NOW!
When you have that list you can divide it into tasks as follows:
- Active Positive Tasks
- Reactive Maintenance Tasks
Active Positive Tasks
So-called because they bring you and your long-term objectives forward. They are neither urgent nor obvious – they require justification, creativity and special effort. Planning, developing new projects or devising new procedures are examples of these tasks; if they are not performed, effects are not immediately obvious BUT their achievement will be directly in line with the achievement of your Key Result Areas.
Reactive Maintenance Tasks
These are the tasks which are probably the most visible part of your job; the day to day routine aspects of your work. Such tasks are usually urgent and quantifiable – individual steps in the process are clear. Such tasks do not require justification – they are part of normally accepted procedure. If these tasks are not done properly or on time, the effects are obvious to others. Reading your emails, doing routine reports are examples of this type of task. These tasks are called maintenance tasks because they maintain things as they are.
Effective time management is about the ability to balance and prioritise.
Make a list of your Active Positive Tasks and your Reactive Maintenance Tasks. Then review your lists:
- What percentage of your time do you spend on each?
- How happy are you with this?
- How can you bring about change in these areas?
Whilst we cannot always change the things that adversely impact upon our working day – interruptions, time wasters – we can control our own behaviour. Bringing about improvements in time management is essentially about changing our behaviour and implementing new techniques and habits.
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on October 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
Sometimes people find that they are spending a lot of their time in repetitive and uninspiring tasks when their real talents aren’t being used to the full by the organisation. Or that their time is continually wasted by others.
Whatever your situation, if you want to make changes, then you need to set objectives!
You may well be familiar with the concept of setting SMART objectives but how often do you actually do it? We cover setting SMART objectives in detail on our Time Management training course, but this short summary should prove useful as a reminder.
Remember: Before you set yourself an objective ask yourself the question:
Is this a SMART objective?
- S Specific (and stated in non-ambiguous terms)
- M Measurable (by the person who has to achieve it)
- A Achievable (and aligned with the objectives of the organisation)
- R Realistic (but challenging)
- T Time-bound (and defined in time)
An example of a normal (non-SMART) objective would be:
Our goal is to improve the way we handle customer complaints
An example of a SMART (that is, effective) objective would be:
Our goal is to handle all customer complaints efficiently and courteously within 72 hours of receiving them starting from January 2005
If your objectives are not clear, then they cannot be measured and if they cannot be measured, you will never know when you have reached them! Neither can interim monitoring and assessment take place, nor really useful follow-up action. You will end up wasting time yet again!!
Consider the objectives of your job. Invest some of your precious time in checking to see if they are SMART or rewriting them if they are not.
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on October 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
Planning is central to time management. It is formed of two elements:
SETTING OBJECTIVES + PRIORITISING
Once you have your objectives clear, you can go ahead and prioritise. But is this as simple as it sounds?
Daily lists
If you don’t have some idea of what needs to be done ‘today’, ‘next week’, ‘ in the future’, you cannot begin to prioritise.
As most people feel stressed by time pressures on a day-to-day basis, the first logical step is to make daily “To Do” lists (which can be augmented by weekly and monthly ‘To Do’ lists).
Write tomorrow’s list before you leave work! Give yourself 10/15 minutes at the end of the day for this task.
Four quadrants
Then assign priorities to each task on your “To Do” list using the Four Quadrant approach:
1. Urgent and important : top priority – Must be done today
2. Important but less Urgent – Should be done today
3. Urgent but not Important – Needs doing now
4. Not important, not urgent – Could be postponed
Quadrants 1, 3 and 4 are where a lot of people spend their worrying lives!
Quadrant 1 activities are needed to achieve immediate results
Quadrants 2 is where you plan and is a place from where you can reduce pressure on Quadrants 1 and 3.
Quadrant 2 activities impede results.
Quadrant 4 activities are wasted time.
Do the 1s first. 2s need to be looked at every day to avoid them becoming 1s or 3s.
Avoid doing the easy tasks first
We cover all of these time management techniques in detail on our Time Management course
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on October 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
Whether we waste our own time or other people waste it for us, we need to be disciplined and vigilant if we want to gain some time. Managers most often point to interruptions from other people as one of their main time wasters.
You cannot eliminate interruptions completely but you can manage them by some of the following strategies. These are covered in more detail on our 1-day Time Management Training Course.
Be firm, clear and assertive
- Ask the interrupter what it is they want to discuss and how long they need. Then negotiate around their expectations.
- Use active listening to hear what is being asked and summarise what is being asked
- Be realistic about what you promise.
- Don’t be pressurised into giving unqualified yes answers you might use YES if… or YES when…
- Deliver what you promise if you’ve agreed to something stick to it or tell the person in good time if you can’t realistically deliver.
- Learn to say no sometimes
- Develop phrases to end discussion, e.g. Well, is that settled, then? Good; I’m glad we’ve got that sorted out for now I’m looking forward to talking to you more about this on Friday
- Be respectful of the other person’s need at that time
- Be prepared to be flexible sometimes!
Keep control: Be proactive NOT reactive
Pro-activity: Owning the power to act.
Reactivity: Letting circumstances and others set your agenda.
One of the key principles in effective Time Management is accepting your own power to affect how things happen around you. Although it may seem that you are completely driven by outside events your own behaviour affects your results.
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on October 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
A key area for improving time management is delegation. When you keep a time log, you may find that many activities, which are eating into your time, should not be done by you at all!
For more in-depth coverage of delegation, we can arrange Effective Delegation Skills course with content tailored to meet your requirements.
It is important that you ask three questions in relation to each of your activities.
- What am I doing that need not be done at all?
- Which of my activities could be done by somebody else as well, if not better?
- What am I doing that wastes the time of others?
Why delegate?
Many managers see delegation as the answer to all their time management worries and almost as the quick fix we are all seeking. It isn’t!!
Successful and effective delegation involves giving a task to someone else ensuring that they know what’s expected and when it’s expected. Delegation is not the dumping of an unwanted task on unsuspecting members of staff with no instruction!
The result of effective delegation should be a saving of your own time so you can reallocate that time for more developmental tasks as well as:
- a saving of other people’s time
- developing the people you manage
- developing your competencies as a manager
See delegation as an investment of time now to save time later!
Delegation skills
- Know the strengths and limitations of your people
- Delegate responsibility not accountability
- Delegate WHOLE tasks
- Delegate in a fair way even if it means taking more time with individuals to develop skills
- Always check that an individual knows what’s expected. Be sure to be clear and specific
- Give as much responsibility as you can, making sure to take into consideration who, what, why and how
- Ensure the necessary resources are available to do the task
- Indicate that you are available for support whilst also allowing people get on with the task
- Be prepared for the fact that the task may not be carried out as you would have done it
- Give the person feedback on his/her work
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on October 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
Here’s a simple checklist to help you to delegate more effectively. These strategies are explored in greater depth on our Effective Delegation Skills training course
- Analysis of the task
First and foremost decide if the task is appropriate for delegation. For instance make sure that it isn’t anything that you alone have been trained to do. What is also very necessary for you to bare in mind is that you must choose the right person for the job, you can’t be biased towards this sort of thing otherwise it will undoubtedly be your downfall. If there is no one capable then I’m afraid the responsibility falls to you to do it once again. But remember delegation is as much a reflection of you as it is on the people you delegate to, as it shows your ability to judge people correctly and can often be a marking that you are capable of this on a larger scale
- Make sure that there is a firm understanding of what needs to be done and why.
The person or people who give the job to should be fully aware of any responsibilities and expectations that come with it. Make sure that they know what sort of a priority this task is and why they were chosen. From the beginning state what you expect and what needs to be achieved, the person or team you have assembled should be under no pretences about what the results should be and when the deadline is. Similarly your team should be properly equipped with the resources and/ or equipment that they will need to get the job done.
Also it is vital at this stage, before the project gets underway, that you reach an understanding with the person, or persons delegated to about how you are going to monitor and check their performance on the project. If you do not breach this topic with your delegates then when you do begin to monitor the situation they might find it interfering or meddling.
- Monitoring and checking results.
This is a very important part of delegation, even though you yourself are not now working on the project at hand it is essential that you take an active interest in how things are going. As was said before it is as much you on the line as it is your delegates, so it is vital that you are fully aware of what is happening and are there on hand to correct any mistakes. If something does go wrong in the project make sure that you understand what went wrong and why it happened, so you will be able to rectify the problem and hopefully stop it from reoccurring.
When your team or delegate has finished the job successfully make sure to let them know that they have done a good job and that their efforts are appreciated. It can sometimes be the case that a manager will take the credit for work done through delegation and whilst you are entitled to credit you should remember that this should include your delegates also.
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Posted by Faye Binfield in Time Management on April 3rd, 2009 | No Comments »
