Time Management Tips For The Workplace

Here are a series of time management tips that many of my clients are successfully using to help them be more productive. If you want to really excel at time management at work and organizing yourself more effectively, dive over to my good friend Carol Halsey's site ... She's an expert in time management systems.

In the meantime here are the time management tips that will get you heading in the right direction:

1. At the start of each week list your objectives/projects for the week (personal and business).
2. Categorize them according to:

Must Achieve,

Could Achieve

If I Get Time

3. Allocate the amount of time you need to complete each of the objectives/projects (If you believe it will take an hour, then allocate two hours - most people tend to under-estimate the amount of time it takes to complete something and this is why so often time management planning comes undone. If you finish earlier than the two hours then you can go on to the next item on your list
4. Decide which of the objectives/projects could be delegated to someone else You can fine-tune your effective delegation skills here

The key is to not to over-schedule yourself. If the time is not realistic look for items you can cut from the schedule and carry over to the next week. You need to ensure you have breathing time.

Time Management Tips For Your Diary:

1. Schedule in your sleep and routine activities (e.g. shower, exercise, family etc)
2. Schedule in appointments, meetings, social activities etc.
3. Schedule in Phone Calls to make, Emails to clear etc.
4. Schedule in the objectives/projects you want to achieve

Make these like a doctor's appointment that cannot be broken

5. Schedule in time to connect with people in your business - training/coaching/mentoring them
6. Make sure you leave free time each day for 'crisis' - the aim is to get this smaller and smaller

One Of The Most Powerful of these Time Management Tips

If your diary does not have it mark out blocks with headings like:

• Work/Information Due from Others
• People to Ring/Contact/Email
• Activities That Must Happen (Eg. Bills to Pay)

Then you can place in these blocks things to do on that particular day. For example, if today is the 25th and I have asked John for information on the 28th, I would make a note of this on the diary page of the 28th under the block "Work Information Due from others".

7. At the end of each day review what you have achieved, what is carried over and what is coming up for the next day.

Communication Pages:

This is both and employee time management tip and one of those time management tips that few people use and yet it is one of the best ... because it not only saves you time it saves others time as well.

How often have you had someone come to you three or four times in the space of a day asking questions ... and each interruption probably costs you about 20 minutes (allowing for the time it takes you to answer and then to get your head back around what it was you were doing?). These five little words "have you got a minute" are some of the most dangerous!

It would have been way more efficient if they had stored the questions up and asked you them all at once!

How often have you been guilty of this?

A good way to avoid this is to keep a folder with A-Z index in it. Have a sheet of paper with each person's name on it that you regularly meet/interact with or projects tasks that you are working on.

On these sheets make notes of:

• Topics you need to discuss with a particular person, questions to raise etc,this way you aren't contacting them every few minutes/hours. You can hold things over for one conversation which is more efficient for you and them
• Tasks to delegate to or assign
• Follow-up items for things you have/(could) delegated to a person (if you have delegated something, place a note in your daily diary page on the due date and reference this communications page)
• Keep a record of phone calls you have with individuals (or are going to make to them) and topics discussed
• Keep a note of ideas that occur for a project that you can't action immediately

These time management tips will definitely set you on the right track ... however if you do really want to move to expertise status - then as I said swing by and visit Carol's site for many more organizing and time management tips.

If you would like some email time management tips then listen to this interview I did with Randy Dean the 'Email Sanity Expert'