Stressed? Basic time management skills seem simple, but are often forgotten in the thrust of day-to-day business. Here are 13 steps to help you get more out of your day.
Basic time management skills may seem simple, but we often forget them in the thrust of day-to-day business. Industry educator Peter Heinrich provides 13 steps to help you make more time to get things done.
Complete the following sentence: “I wish I had more time for ...” Following that, complete this sentence: “I know I sometimes waste time on ...” Answering both of these questions can provide us with most of the solutions – but let’s look at the issues.
Our principal time stealers are many and varied. They include telephone interruptions, visitors and meetings, tasks that should be delegated, procrastination and indecision, inadequate technical knowledge, unclear objectives and priorities, acting with incomplete information, crisis management, unclear communications, lack of planning, stress and fatigue, the inability to say no, desk management and personal disorganisation.
What I have come up with are 13 strategies to help alleviate the frustration with the way we sometimes use our time:
1. Come to work to do work: I know many of you work from home so how tempting is it to just vacuum that room or put out that load of washing. Are you able to get done what you need to without going into leisure time? Time must be spent on planning and organising – using time to think is time well spent. An analogy I use is to think of your more productive work days (the days before a holiday is a good example). We are effective because we are focused, do not waste time on non-productive tasks and we are not distracted. How effective would we be if we were like that all the time?
2. Stay in control, take an attitude check and leave your problems at the door: Act like you like it and allow time for interruptions (plan 50% of your time for interruptions). Schedule routine tasks when you expect to be interrupted.
3. Set goals: SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Optimum goals cause you to ‘stretch’ but not ‘break’ as you strive for achievement. Goals give creative people a much-needed sense of direction.
4. Plan your work and work your plan: Daily, weekly, monthly, annual and career. Schedule time for emails, phone calls, ‘quiet time’, time to get rid of ‘e-clutter’. Schedule time to create and update a good file system and monthly maintenance. Schedule time for professional development.
5. A place for everything: Clean it up, practice the art of intelligent neglect (i.e. ignore things that don’t matter). Eliminate distractions, trivial tasks and tasks which have no long-term consequences. Take 10 minutes a day to clean up. Handle it once, which means either: Do it, put it onto ‘to do list’, file it or trash it.
6. Prioritise: Use the 80/20 rule, 80% of the reward comes from 20% of your efforts. We must isolate and identify 20%. Prioritise time to concentrate your work on those with the greatest reward.
7. Use a ‘to do’ list: The last things not completed from the previous day and the urgent things for today. Running the ‘to do’ list means concentrating on the most important things on that list. Can I suggest the ‘if I do nothing else today’ list?
8. Your biorhythms’ ‘prime time’: People understand their prime time during the day. Some people are morning while others are afternoon or night people. Schedule the prime time for priorities.
9. If it’s urgent, do it now: However, we have to take care that we are not creating the urgent issues. Urgent tasks have short-term consequences so we must work towards reducing urgent things. Important tasks have long-term, goal-oriented implications. Flagging items on a ‘to do’ list may help keeping important things from becoming urgent ones.
10. Avoid being a perfectionist: Perfectionism is paying unnecessary attention to detail, and can be a form of procrastination.
11. Overcome procrastination: Rather than avoiding something, break it into smaller tasks, do just one of the smaller tasks, or work on the larger task for a short time. By doing a little at a time, eventually you’ll reach a point where you’ll want to finish.
12. Learn to say ‘no’: Sometimes very difficult for new brokers who just want to help everyone, where that is not always possible. Your priorities are important so say no to the unimportant. It prevents you from over-promising and under-delivering.
13. Reward yourself – for even small successes: Celebrate any achievement of a goal. Promise yourself a reward for completing each task or finishing a total job, then keep your promise to yourself and indulge in your reward.
Finally, complete this sentence: “The first technique that I will use to use my time more efficiently is…”
Peter Heinrich is the managing director of mortgage and finance industry trainer The National Finance Institute.
