How Good is Your Time Management?
Paul Puckridge
I help managers and employees become more effective at work by helping to develop their soft skills.
Do you manage to get everything done that you need to each day, or do you get caught up chasing bright shiny objects, fixing other people’s problems, or working on other people’s tasks?
If you can’t manage your time and are constantly checking your inbox, looking at your phone messages, looking across the room for a visual distraction, and working on a Word document, let me tell you that it’s no way to be effective at work.
So, how can you be more productive and manage your time better at work? Let me share three things to consider and implement better if you want to be the master of your time and not the slave.
1. Time management is a marathon, not a sprint.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”
Many employees think that they will magically manage their time better by attending a time management seminar. That’s simply not true. To better manage your time and improve this critical soft skill, you need to implement some simple time management strategies each day until these practices become daily habits.
If you feel you’re not managing your time well, what time management behaviours are you trying to cultivate at the moment?
If you realise that you need to manage your time better, but you’re unsure where to start, consider my next time management strategies.
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2. Think about your month, your week, and today
If you want to develop good time management and productivity habits, you can’t come to work every day and be influenced only by what is or isn’t in your inbox. When I’m asked to help overloaded employees manage their time better in many of my coaching engagements, one of the first questions I ask them is, “tell me how you’ve planned the month ahead? How have you planned this week? And, what are your plans for today?”
I’m often confronted with a blank look on the employees. Many sheepishly ask me, “Paul, what do you mean by planning my month, week, or day?”
Suffice to say that if you want to manage your time well, it all starts with understanding what has to be done, and you do that with good planning.
3. Write down what you need to achieve today.
The third and final time management insight is understanding the importance of writing a daily to-do list. Although you might have lots of things in your head, tasks you need to do sitting in your inbox, and other files and folders on your desk, one of the most essential activities you can undertake at the start of every day is to take a spiral notebook, rule it up. And then go ahead and write your task list down. In other words, all the things you need to get done today.
If you’re wondering how many tasks you should write on your to-do list, the answer is about 6-10. Of course, it depends on how long each task will take, but in my experience, most employees will get through a maximum of 10 tasks each day.?
Therefore, don’t write 25 things on your daily to-do list. What do you do with the other 15 tasks? That’s another strategy I will be sharing with you in the next article.