Three Goals for Better Time Management
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 self 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 you 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.
