Time Management Tips

Do you ever have the feeling that there aren’t sufficient hours in the day? Time management is something that can make a huge difference to what you can achieve during the working day. The following are a series of tips to help you and your team manage time successfully.

Organization and Goal Setting

• Decide your personal life/career objectives.

• Specify the objectives in specific terms. Make them measurable: have specific aims and deadlines.

• Break your aims down into assessable objectives.

• Review your aims at regular intervals. Don’t just write them down and forget them.

• Keep your written aims at hand always.

• Focus on the efforts that contribute to your improvement.

• Review your personal mission, aims and objectives at regular intervals – and assess how much you achieved.

Planning

• Plan your time. Don’t let it control you.

• Assess your work carefully and allocate priorities.

• Allocate priorities in order: A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s.

• A’s are important and urgent.

• B’s are important, but not urgent.

• C’s can be dealt with outside of your key business/sales time.

• D’s are unimportant, and can be discarded immediately.

• Make appointments with yourself in your diary for personal time to evaluate your progress and plan time for the coming days and weeks.

• Stick to your day as you have planned it. Make a plan and stick to it.

• To help with planning, always ask the questions: what, who, why, where, when and how?

Delegation

• Concentrate on those “tasks” whose success depends on you.

• Delegate wherever possible. Make use of administrative, technical or specialist staff.

• When delegating, do not abdicate tasks. If it is your “task”, it is your final responsibility.

• Agree a timeline for tasks which are being delegated, then let the other person get on with them.

• Make sure the delegation instruction has been fully understood and leave room for questions.