Time Management

“There aren’t enough hours in the day!” is a common lament. The gap between what we feel we should be doing and what we actually achieve is negotiated on a daily basis for many of us as we attempt to respond to demands of superiors, spouses, children, colleagues and friends. Time management is learning how to decide what activities are important to achieve your prepared goals and how to go about doing them It is also about deciding what not to do.

If you feel that you are always “out of time” and this is creating anxiety, change the way you manage time now.

Time Analysis In 4 Steps

Step 1

Time management begins with time analysis. The goal should be to eliminate time wasters and redundancies. Start by identifying how you spend your time by keeping a journal of hourly log for a few days or a week. Take special note of repetitive tasks and the amount of time you are merely waiting for something or searching for something. These types of activities create anxiety and stress, which is not good for your overall health. In your time record keep details of the starting time of each task, how much time the task took, the type of activity and whether or not the task was completed.

Step 2

Next, review your log and ask the following questions:

• What are the things that occupy most of my time
• Are these things that I need or want to be doing
• Do these activities reflect my values
• Is there a better way to order the tasks I am currently doing
• Is there a more satisfactory way to organise what I do?

Step 3

To assist you to eliminate or better control those tasks that cause stress disproportionate to their value ask the following:

• How can I cut down its frequency or do it in a less intense part of the day
• Can I restructure the task so I can be more efficient
• Is there another way I can do the task so it will be less stressful
• Is the task necessary at all
• Can I delegate the task to someone who might do it more effectively
• Have I allocated sufficient time or resources for the task to be completed to my satisfaction
• Am I too compulsive about doing the task perfectly? Or do I recheck myself again and again?

Step 4

Now you should have a clear idea about how you currently spend your time and areas in which you could improve the efficiency of your time usage.

Quick Tip: 5 Time Saving Strategies

1. “A place for everything and everything in its place”. To minimise time wasted while searching for something get into the habit of returning items to their usual place.
2. Handle each piece of paper (or email) as few times as possible. When you pick up a note, letter, file or email, make an immediate decision and act upon it as often as possible.
3. Learn how to control the telephone. The telephone can be a great time saver, but not if you are engaged in a long meaningless ramble that interrupted you during a busy time. It’s important that you learn to terminate these types of conversations in a polite but clear manner. Phrases such as “Beth, I’d love to talk longer, but I must get on with something that I’m in the middle of” or“Can I get back to you when I have an answer?” can be helpful to terminate such a conversation. You can also use an answering machine to screen incoming calls. When calling others be considerate of their time by always having an agenda in mind and mentally ticking off items as the conversation progresses. In addition to saving time, your message is more likely to be heard clearly by the other person.
4. Take charge of deadlines. Deadlines are helpful for defining goals for specific tasks, but they can also be extremely stressful. When faced with a formidable task, break it down into smaller more manageable deadlines.
5. Learn to delegate (both at work and at home). If you are carrying more than the load of one person it is important to delegate to ensure maximum efficiency. The failure to delegate usually comes from an inability to trust the competence of others combined with a fear of failure. Work on developing your delegation skills because in the longer term it is likely to save you significant amounts of time.

Becoming A Better Time Manager

Learning to manage your time better is something that needs to be worked on regularly and consistently. Several useful tips for success in this activity are outlined below.

Goals and Priorities

The first step to taking a broad overview of your time management is to write a list of your short (in the next 2 to 3 years) and long term goals. These can be further divided into work and non-work related goals or, more specifically, into broad categories such as career, family, social, financial, and so forth. To make the task even more useful, assign an age by which you wish to have achieved each goal.

Assign each goal a value as high (A), medium (B) or low priority (C). If you end up with several “high” priorities then recategorise the goals as A1, A2, A3 and so on until you have 2 or 3 goals as the top priority. Recognise that these lists can be reviewed regularly and should be updated every 6 to 12 months or as your life circumstances change significantly.

On a separate piece of paper, list the steps to be taken to achieve each individual goal. This helps to clarify objectives and help in planning activities. Update this list regularly to maintain your focus and enthusiasm. More about goal achievement is provided on the Mental Health Self-Help web site.

Decision Making

Two of the greatest barriers to time management are indecisiveness and time wasting. Indecisiveness in particular is often the result of being afraid to make a mistake. The decision is regarded as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity. It is important that you stay focused on your top priority objectives and on those steps most likely to achieve these. Identify those activities which are likely to produce the best results in terms of your goals and spend most time on these. Become adept at rapidly evaluating situations and making decisions in a timely and efficient manner.

Remember, in general 80% of our results are achieved by a significant but relatively small 20% of our time.

Procrastination

Procrastination can be a major speed hump in our path to achieving our goals - if we let it go unchecked. The most important factor in overcoming procrastination is to take that first step. Just getting started on your list of activities will help to reduce the size of the speed hump in front of you.

Deadlines

Setting deadlines is useful in keeping you on track with monitoring your time. To be most effective you need to realistically estimate how long each activity will take you and then to consider how much and of what you can fit into your available time. It can be helpful to draft a daily “to-do” list that prioritises the day’s goals to encourage you to focus on those that you perceive are of highest priority. This also helps you to minimise procrastination and time wasters throughout your day, because each element of the day is structured according to an overall plan.

Planning

If it hasn’t already become clear from the information so far, the key to time management is to plan, in writing, what you intend to achieve today, tomorrow, this week, next week, this month, next month, this year and so forth. Good planning will not inure you from crises, however, it means that you will have a plan to return to once the crisis has passed.

Tyranny Of The Urgent

Often, there seems to be urgency about everything - we start one task, partially complete it and then move on to another. Many tasks are treated as being urgent because they have been requested by someone else. It is important not to confuse tasks that are important with tasks that are urgent. To utilise your time more effectively establish:

1. What is urgent and important;
2. Important and not urgent;
3. Urgent and not important; and,
4. Not important and not urgent.

This will assist you in making decisions about which tasks to work on first (i.e., those in category 3 and 4 can be left until last).

Quick Tip

Time management is not about trying to do more things each day, but deciding what is important in terms of your objectives and to stop doing things that are not important to you (Kidman, 2001).

Managing At Work

One of the biggest obstacles to getting things done at work is interruptions. Telephone calls are often among the worse offenders. It is important to develop appropriate methods of overcoming these interruptions, for example, telephone calls can be screened when interruptions are unwanted. Many contemporary management texts (available from your local library, Defence library, and any good bookshop) offer sound advice for better time management in the work environment.

The importance of prioritising your activities has been highlighted. Making a “To Do” list every day will help to ensure you remain on track to achieving your objectives.

However, this strategy is only effective if you complete each task before moving onto the next in the order of priority. It is very easy to become distracted during the day with other tasks that appear to subsume the priority order. Make sure you review each new task to determine its level of urgency (as outlined above) and then slot it into your activity plan in the appropriate priority order. Another strategy to ensure you keep to the priority plan is to make sure you complete the most difficult and challenging tasks in the part of the day when you are most alert (for most people this is the morning).

8 Quick Tips For Better Time Management At Work

1. Institute one hour of your day which is a block of uninterrupted time during which you can achieve your most important tasks.
2. Make sure the first hour of your working day is productive.
3. Develop the habit of finishing what you start.
4. Analyse everything you do in terms of your objectives.
5. Eliminate at least one time waster from your life each week.
6. Plan your time - write out a plan for each day, week, month and year.
7. Review priorities and progress midway through the day.
8. Look out for procrastination. Are you putting it off because you're setting yourself too high a standard? Are you being unrealistic about what you could do? Could you do it now and get it out of the way?

Further resources

Your local library is usually a good resource for general information on time management. For more specific assistance please contact the Regional Mental Health Team or DCO.