Time management

What is time management?

Good time management helps you to keep your work under control. As the time you have is finite – you can never have more than 24 hours a day – maximising the use of the time you have available is essential. Nothing is worse than feeling that you have worked really hard for a long period but achieved very little. Good time management can reduce or avoid you wasting time and as a result achieve more.

A person who manages their time well is likely to be someone who usually avoids the stress of work overload, who concentrates on results rather than just on 'being busy' and is seen to be effective.

Improving your time management

Understand how you manage your time

Everyone manages their time differently. What helps is to understand:

• how you work
• what time of the day you are most productive
• what is preventing you from being even more effective in managing your time.

A good first step in understanding how you work is to go to the MindTools website. The site includes an online test 'how good is your time management?' which you can use to assess your current time management. It then directs you to other parts of the site where you can access information on several useful tools and techniques such as goal setting, managing interruptions, prioritisation etc.

Two time management tools 

Two management tools that can help are:

The Pareto principle - the 20/80 principle… 

The Pareto principle says that of the things you do during your day, only 20 per cent really matter. But those 20 per cent produce 80 per cent of your results.

If you can identify and focus on those things – and find that important 20 per cent - it will make a real difference in how you manage your time.

The important/urgent matrix

Stephen Covey in 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' describes a time management matrix that divides tasks or activities into four quadrants. Those that are:

• urgent and important
• urgent and not important
• not urgent and important
• not urgent and not important.

Effective time managers spend most of their time dealing with things that are important but not urgent. These can include tasks but also as Stephen Covey says:

“building relationships, writing a personal mission statement, long range planning, exercising, preventive maintenance, preparation – all those things we know we need to do, but somehow seldom get round to doing”.

Barriers to improving your time management

Email obsession

Checking your email every five minutes won’t help you manage your time better. Unless you are waiting for an important message to arrive, restrict the number of times you check your email box to two or three times a day.

Procrastinating

Even when you are clear about the tasks you must get done, there will be times when you find yourself procrastinating; when you just can’t get started on a task or you keep putting it off. At other times you can’t complete something you’ve started or you are stuck somewhere in the middle! But whatever is happening, you can waste considerable time procrastinating and feel very stressed as a result.

Why do you say “yes” to tasks when you are already very busy? How to Overcome Procrastination (pdf, 24kb) by Sharon Juden lists questions to help you understand what is going on and what you might be able to do to avoid procrastinating.

Tips to improve your time management

Here are some tips from the consultancy team at the Centre for Charity Effectiveness – with thanks to Julia Lever, Denise Fellows, George Levvy and Fiona Ash:

• David Allen's Getting Things Done. Needless to say I have never made time to finish the book (now there's a surprise) but I know folk who are disciples and who are very busy, very effective etc. He has built up a whole seminar/consulting business based around getting a decent system/process in place and what he refers to as 'the 2-minute rule'.
• I always try to remember that I need to be in the right frame of mind, the right state, to be really effective. I have a little acronym, FIRST, which I use to remember the states that are really important to me personally to be in the right frame of mind. I like the acronym because it reminds me of Stephen Covey’s first habit for highly effective people (First things first) one of the best time management books written.

• F – focused – to be very clear about what I want to achieve
• I – intelligent  – hard to be effective when I am feeling tired and sluggish
• R – resourceful – this is the one state which gets really hammered if I feel low
• S - smart – measured - aligned- realistic  - - not really a state - more about lists
• T - time constrained – I work better under pressure

• The best one I have encountered (from Get Everything Done by Mark Foster) starts from the recognition that the problem is often a feeling of being overwhelmed – too much to do, feels like you’ll never get through it, so you are unable to start. So, identify a list of five or six things and do five minutes on each – strictly timed, stop when the beeper goes off. Repeat or do 10 minute chunks. It changes the mindset. If you’re thinking ‘I only have to do five minutes on this’ your mind gets going. And then, while you’re doing the other things it’s ticking over in the back of your mind. You’d be amazed how you get through stuff. And it allows you to mix big and little chunks at different apparent levels of importance – like doing emails and planning a course and doing the dishes.                                                       
  
• Avoid long do lists which only lead to a sense of failure and frustration as it’s impossible to do everything before I need to add more items to the bottom. I find it more helpful to keep an overall list but do a daily list of the things I really need to do that day. Then I can go to the master list and cross something off which makes me feel so efficient!

Useful links

• A lecture (YouTube video) in November 2007 on time management by the late Professor Randy Pausch, University of Virginia.  
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (Franklin Covey).
• The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard (Berkley Books)
• How To Get More Done by Fergus O’Connell (Prentice Hall, 2007) who 'applies the principles of project management to the most important project of all – you'. The book comprises seven sections with each section delivering a new principle to help you achieve more (for example: Day Three - 'How not to do stuff', Day Five - 'How to do as little as possible') by concentrating on things that need to be done.
• Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time (PDF) by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy – an article by Harvard Business Review (October 2007)
• Two posts from Harvard Business Review on managing your time: How to mitigate the urgent to focus on the important and An 18-minute plan to manage your day.

Have your say

We’d love to hear your tips and advice on time management. What really works for you? What are the things that stop you managing your time well?

Share your tips on the Your professional development forum.