2 Ways To Improve Time Management

There are just two things you can do to improve your time management skills - find out what they are and what you need to do here:

• Do less
• Be more efficient

Do Less

To do this you need to prioritise effectively. If you have trouble doing this, here’s an easy way:

Be clear what it is you are trying to achieve. Once you have identified that, then just ask yourself if what you are thinking of doing will help you to achieve it.

So, for example, if you need to increase sales in your department, before you do anything, ask yourself if doing that will increase sales. If it will, do it. If not, you should be questioning it.

That’s what prioritisation is all about –having an easy way of deciding if and when you should do something.

Be More Efficient

This is about doing more stuff in less time. It’s what most people want to do. Let me give you one little trick that will help you to focus your effort where it will really make a difference.

It will take you a bit more time initially but it will save you a lot in the long term.

Take a week to monitor where your time goes. Just use a simple spreadsheet and a stopwatch (pretty cheap these days).

Start the stopwatch off as soon as you start any task and stop it when you finish. Then enter the time into your spreadsheet. Very quickly you’ll start to see the categories that will make sense to you. Things like:

• Answering emails
• Filing
• Writing reports
• Meetings
• Telephone calls

I’m sure you will have specific things that fit in with your work.

Once you have done this for a week, sort the times into order - starting with what takes up most of your time and, if you can, get the spreadsheet to draw you a graph. You’ll end up with something like this:



Now you are in a position to look at efficiency savings. Start at the left hand end. Even if you make a small saving here, it will make a much bigger difference to you than a huge saving at the other end.