Article Options
	Print Article
	Email Article
T	Textsize: down up
Share Article Delicious Digg Facebook reddit StumbleUpon Yahoo! MyWeb

Advice for Executives

Time Management

Chairing Meetings

Motivational Techniques

Managing Organisational Change

Time Management

The leading professionals across all industry sectors owe their success partly to their ability to manage their time effectively, enhance their productivity and maintain a comfortable work-life balance.  Effective time management is a personal thing – what works for one person may not work for others.  It is important to discover what systems and processes work best for you and to stick to them, while ensuring that you are also able to respond to unforeseen occurrences throughout the day.

Tools for effective time management

There are a number of systems and procedures you can use to improve the way you handle your daily workload.  These include:

• To-do lists
• Activity logs
• The art of delegation

Pros and cons of to-do lists

To-do lists should be prepared in advance, either before you leave the office in the evening or at the start of the day, and should list everything you need to do that day in order of priority.  Some people choose to break these lists down further with more complex tasks at the top which, in turn, can be separated into smaller, individual tasks.

It can be argued that if you fail to complete all the tasks on the list, this form of time management can actually become rather demoralising.  Also as more tasks are added throughout the day, they can seem like never-ending lists!

However, they do help you to see exactly what tasks you have left to deal with and which ones are the most important.  There is also something uniquely satisfying about being able to cross off the tasks you have completed – preferably with a big, red pen!

It is imperative to adhere to the to-do list and not to pick out tasks at random.  This ensures that tasks are completed in the required order of priority.

Activity logs

Activity logs record what you have actually achieved during the day and when you achieved it; in that sense, it is similar to a diary.  It can help to indicate when you have been at your most, and least, productive, and can be used in conjunction with a to-do list so that you can arrange to complete the most urgent tasks at the time of day when your performance peaks.

Don’t take on too much

One of the keys to effective time management is knowing when to say “no”!  If your to-do list is already full, it can be really hard to have to take on more tasks.  However, it is also vital that you show willingness to support your junior colleagues and to undertake additional responsibilities on behalf of managers.  Even these unforeseen tasks can be prioritised and some can be left for a later date entirely.  It is important to bear in mind though that the more you say “yes” to people the more they will expect of you.

Delegation

Delegating is a very useful art and can be used to pass work on to junior or senior colleagues, thus giving you more time to focus on your urgent tasks.

The pros:

• It is an effective way of finding out who you can trust in your team to carry out work to the standards that you expect
• It is also an opportunity to develop team members; gradually, they will become more competent so that you will be confident that tasks assigned to them in the future will be completed on time and to the required standard

The cons:

• Passing the job to someone else in order to save time could mean you spend more time explaining to them how you want the job done
• Someone else will end up getting the credit for the work that you were originally assigned!

Coping with the unexpected

To-do lists must incorporate an element of free time to enable you to respond to unexpected calls, visits or tasks.  Disruptions like these are unavoidable in most roles but it is important that you don’t allow them to have a significant impact on your work.

• Make people around you aware of when you are able to be disturbed for visitors or callers
• Remain standing with unexpected visitors – this prevents them from getting too comfortable and generally speeds up their visit!
• Arrange a meeting for another time and at a mutually agreeable location
• Similarly with phone calls, take the call, explain that you cannot talk at the moment and arrange a call back time

Don’t put off ‘til tomorrow

Avoiding certain tasks or decisions because you are not in the right frame of mind or because you are waiting for a more suitable time can lead to an enormous amount of wasted time.  These tasks often end up being put off and put off, and are sometimes never completed!  The best ways to avoid such procrastination are to:

• Make sure that you have prioritised your to-do list effectively
• Tackle the task in question as soon as possible to get it out of the way 

Top tips

Other useful ways of managing your time more effectively include:

• Allowing time for relaxation (even if it is just switching off the phone and locking the door!)
• Reduce the amount of clutter on your desk – you can’t be productive if you are constantly wading through heaps of paperwork to find what you need
• Similarly, reduce the mail in your email inbox – schedule time in your to-do list to read through emails 

Although you may have to spend some time putting the procedures in place in order to achieve successful time management, you should soon benefit from your increased productivity and the lack of time spent on meaningless tasks.