The Tribune

By Ian Ferguson

DO YOU ever feel like you have insufficient time within a business day to complete all of the tasks assigned? Perhaps you join the thousands of business professionals who are consumed and inundated with work overload. Most persons would admit that in their personal and professional lives, their time management and organisational skills are usually weak. Some others would argue that since time is constant and cannot be regulated or manipulated, it is not time that has to be managed but, rather, the individual.

Executives who are challenged in managing their time must remember that this lack of organisation results in low productivity and efficiency. Here are a few tips that will assist business professionals in regulating their time and talent:

• Determine where you are wasting time. We all fall victim to time wasters that steal the time we could be using much more productively. What are your time-bandits? Do you spend too much time Face-Booking, making personal calls, idle talk with co-workers? Tracking daily plans explains how to track your activities, so you can form an accurate picture of what you actually do, the first step to effective time management.

• Create time management goals. Remember, the focus of time management is actually changing your behaviours, not changing time. A good place to start is by eliminating your personal time-wasters, but the next step has to be disciplining yourself to change your actions through positive goal setting, one day after the next, one goal after the other. This requires the successful implementation of a time management plan. You will need to not only set your specific goals, but track them over time to see whether or not you are accomplishing them.

• Use time management tools. Whether it is a Daily Planner or Microsoft Outlook, the first step to physically managing your time is to know where it is going now and planning how you are going to spend your time in the future.

• Prioritise ruthlessly. Start each day with a time management session prioritising the tasks for that day and setting your performance benchmark. If you have 20 tasks for a given day, how many of them do you truly need to accomplish? Determine which are Urgent, Important, not urgent and not important.

• Learn to delegate and/or outsource. No matter how small your business is, there’s no need for you to be a one-man band. For effective time management, you need to let other people carry some of the load. Determine what you are going to delegate and stick to the delegation plan.

• Establish routines and stick to them as much as possible. While crises will arise, you’ll be much more productive if you can follow routines most of the time.

• Get in the habit of setting time limits for tasks. You could easily sit for a whole day and respond to e-mails. Or sit and write a letter perfecting it to capture exactly what you are trying to say. We have all been caught making these kinds of errors in time management. Set a limit and stick to it.

• Be sure your systems are organised. Are you wasting a lot of time looking for files on your computer? Take the time to organise a file management system. Redo all of your operating systems that limit your ability to function efficiently.

• Don’t waste time waiting.

• You cannot avoid the wait at the dentist, doctors or principal’s office, but you don’t need to just sit there and twiddle your thumbs. Always take something to do with you.

Technology makes it easy to work wherever you are. Take your blackberry, Smart phone, I-Pad and work while you wait.