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The article by Mike Sissens in this month’s issue of the IMI’s Motor Industry Management introduced some basic principles of how to manage your time better. 

It also provided a self-assessment checklist so that you could identify any major time stealers – areas of your work where time tends to just disappear.

If you have used the self-check questionnaire and assessment, you may have identified some areas where you can manage your time better. 

So how to get more out of your time?

The starting point of any activity is to understand what your current position is – and know what you want to do about it.

The self-assessment checklist asked 20 questions that are based on eight areas, which are a common cause of poor time management:
These are:
 
Category                                                  Questions
Attitude                                          12, 20
Personal organisation                         3,4,5,6,13
Inability to say ‘no’                            11, 15
Meetings                                          8
Priorities / Objectives                         1, 2, 16, 18
Telephone interruptions                      7,14
Unexpected visitors                           10,17
Inability to finish work / indecision        9, 16, 19

 Managing your time – here are some tactics.

Attitude

Here we deliberately use the expression ‘managing your time’ rather than time management to emphasise the point that we all only have 24 hours every day. 

Managing your time is about prioritising and making decisions – in other words taking responsibility (being response able) for what you do in the time available to you.

Stress tends to be caused not by what is done, but by what is not done.  Take control of the way you work and feel better - look at the following suggestions and if they are appropriate, do something about it.

·Don’t be a workaholic if it isn’t you.  In some countries, and in some companies within the UK - it is considered a sign of weakness if you are unable to do your job before 5-00 PM rather than the more general macho tendency in the UK and USA for working long hours.

 Meetings

·Are all the meetings you attend really necessary?  Do they add value to your role?

·If they are important / relevant (or your boss expects you to be there anyway), do you need to be present for the full meeting?  How about excusing yourself once your subject/contribution has been completed?

·Remember that the same applies whether you are attending someone else’s meeting or if it is your own meeting.

 Priorities / objectives

·Ask yourself often -  ‘what is the best use of my time right now?’

·It is often the tasks that are urgent (come with a time deadline) that naturally get our attention first.  On the other hand, important tasks don’t usually get the same profile unless, of course, they are both important and urgent.  Yet by definition, it is the important tasks, which are likely to yield most benefit.  Tasks that are both urgent and important should be done first.  Lowest priority tasks get left lower down the list.

· Urgent tasks are almost inevitable in today’s business world – the knack is to ensure at least some/part of your important tasks also get completed.

·Important tasks don’t always have an easy or obvious place to start. 
Tip – start anywhere just as long as you start.

· What does an important task look like?  If in doubt, it is probably the task you least want to tackle. BANJO – Bang Out A Nasty Job Often!

· Too much paper work? 
Tip – try to only touch any piece of paper once. 
Remember the 3 D’s – DO IT, DITCH IT or DELEGATE IT. 

· Don’t fall into the trap that you are the only person that can carry out a task – this is often not the case.

· One tip I have learnt is to take a coloured pen – red is good, and mark the paper in the top right hand corner with a small dot. If the paper has a whole load of dots on it – there is a strong message there!

·Prioritising tasks will only work if you have a clear idea of what the key purpose of your role is.  What are the ‘essential’ elements of your job and what are merely ‘desirable’?

· Focus on the results – not just the tasks!

· Write a ‘to do list’ – tasks that you need to do.  Prioritising these in terms of urgent/important may be useful but my main tip would be this – before you finish your day’s work, review your list and delete completed tasks and add new ones whist they are still fresh in your mind.  You start the next day feeling more in control and hit the day running with a clear idea of what you need to do.

·  Schedule in social time and holidays into your diary in advance.

· Another variation on the theme is thinking in terms of must do, should do and could do.

· Plan in some planning time – actually make an appointment with yourself to do this!
Telephones

 Ensue you don’t become a slave to the phone.  Use voicemail to give you free time when you are not contactable.  Just as important, ‘batch’ together return phone calls so you can clear them at the same time

·If you finish your day and wonder where all the time went, there’s a good chance that it disappeared while you were on the phone.  Try timing your phone calls – if you use a phone with a call timer on it, take note! Use the phone to make calls that may avoid meetings or unnecessary traveling – these will inevitably take more time.  If possible and appropriate, send an email instead – even quicker, there is a written record and it is likely to take a fraction of the time of a phone call.

Inability to say ‘no’

·How often are you asked by others to undertake a task?  Often?  It’s one thing to be helpful but in practice, it also results in your priorities being replaced by those of the other person.

·Even if your boss is the worst culprit, ask him/her whether the new task is considered more important that what you would have been doing. Get your boss to agree your list of priorities.Don’t over commit – build in some slack into tasks with deadlines otherwise that non-urgent task is likely to become urgent at some stage.

· Are you the best person to do the job / can anyone else do the task?  Delegate if possible.

Unexpected visitors

·Close the office door sometimes (if possible).  Rather than stating that you’re ‘not available’, say ‘I am not available until …’  ‘I will be available at’

·If meetings are a central part of your role, try and reduce the duration of them without compromising the quality.

·Stand up to greet visitors - meetings are shorter if you both have to stand.

·Remove the guest chair in your office – only get a chair when really needed!

·If you need to see someone, see him or her in their office - it is easier to excuse yourself than it is to ask someone to leave your office!

 Inability to finish work

· Don’t procrastinate – if you decide not to do something immediately, ask yourself the following question: ‘what other information can I expect to get that will help me to make a better decision?’  If the answer is none, then get on and do it.

·With complex tasks with no obvious place to start, it is probably better to start somewhere rather than put it off.  Split large tasks into smaller jobs.

·Don’t be a perfectionist – completing the last 5% of a task can sometimes take 20%+ of the time.  Is this a good investment of your time? Sometimes good enough is good enough!