Time Management

5 Define. It will help you greatly if you can set clear and positive goals: “I’d like to…”, “In five years’ time I want to be able to…” You can then break down these goals into more immediate aims, such as steps to obtain a qualification, gain experience or learn new skills. Think about what the next steps would be in order to fulfil the goals and aims that you have set for yourself.

Focus on what motivates you, the things you would like to achieve and what personal fulfilment means to you.

1.2 Think about your personal goals (#ulink_ef657606-5d1a-5ef6-9d40-82961d5cf480)

Goals can be related to your work, to your family life or to life in your community. They might even relate to playing a role on the world stage. Whatever the case, it is only once you have set yourself a goal that you can plan how to translate it into reality.

Your goal might be, for example, “to become a partner in this firm by the age of 30”, or “to spend 50% more time with my family” or “to help underprivileged children”. Whatever the goal, once you have settled on your main objectives, you can begin to break them down into smaller steps to enable them to be realized.

case study Five years ago, Alex knew he wanted to work in Thailand: that was his dream and passion. He was already qualified as a teacher in his home country, but he needed further training to refine his skills and learn the local language. He couldn’t give up his full-time job, so he decided to spend an evening every week for two years learning the local language from a friend, and studying the background and culture of the country. His focused, practical steps taken towards this long-term goal eventually paid off, and Alex is now teaching in Thailand with a real sense of fulfilment.

A useful exercise at this stage is to prepare a pattern diagram of the various activities surrounding your goal. This is a diagram you creatively draw that captures what you perceive to be the main aspects of your central idea. To do this, you should:

Take a blank sheet of A4 paper, arranging it in landscape format.

Write your central goal (a word or a few words, not a whole sentence) in the middle of the paper.

Write around that central word other key words that relate to it.

Keep branching out various other aspects of the goal that come into your mind.

If you get stuck at any point, answer the fundamental questions: who?, why?, where?, what?, when? and how? Doing this will stimulate your thinking process.

At this stage, do not reject any thoughts.

You can colour different key words to show which relate to each other.

You can number the different key words, too, in order of importance.

Hopefully you’ll find it a useful way to think about your goals, what other aspects of your life they may affect, and get a clearer picture of what steps you’ll need to take to achieve them.

Define your goals and think creatively about the different aspects of them.

1.3 Know when you work best (#ulink_0f590410-7d57-5520-b88c-7e594f5b6dff)

Each one of us has a period of time during the day when we work best. It could be early morning, mid-morning after coffee, after lunch or in the evening. You should be doing the most important or difficult work when you are most alert.

When working out which time of day you work best, remember that eating a heavy meal can make your work rate slower, and so you are more likely to make mistakes. You should guard your most productive time and not use it doing non-productive tasks. The saying goes, “time spent sharpening a pencil is never wasted”, but you shouldn’t use your high-energy time to sharpen pencils!

case study Stan works in an office and knows that he works best in the morning. Every day as far as possible he completes the parts of his work that need more concentrated thought between 9am and 1pm. In the afternoon, he makes himself available for meetings or routine admin tasks. He has to be flexible to some extent, but he gets more work done by grouping tasks into those that need concentration and those that are purely administrative than by shifting from one to the other.

one minute wonder Take your diary and highlight across a week the one hour every day when you know you are most productive.

Morning people. For many people, the best time of day is the morning, when they are most alert, have the highest energy levels and so do their best work. There are two well-known proverbs for morning people: “An hour in the morning is worth two in the evening.” “Lose an hour in the morning and you’ll be all day hunting for it.”

Energy through the week. The same principle also applies to days of the week. If you work best on Mondays and Tuesdays, schedule routine meetings for later in the week.

For example, standing around in a queue at 8am waiting to hand in your car at a garage is frustrating for you if your highest energy level is at that time. If you can hand it in later in the day, once your hardest work has been done, then that will be better for you. Keeping as far as possible to this time will help you avoid becoming distracted by all the constant interruptions that can turn you away from fulfilling the task you have to complete.

You shouldn’t be using your most productive time on routine tasks.

1.4 Track how you spend your time (#ulink_7067954c-2823-5417-abe2-db09742f7b17)

An important step in managing your time is to know how you are actually spending your time. A very useful exercise to work this out exactly is to record the minutiae of your day.

There are two ways of working out how long you spend on different tasks: one is to estimate, the other is to record accurately. The second way is better. If you do this for a day (or ideally, longer), you will probably be surprised that many tasks take longer than you think.

Set up a chart on hard copy or on a spreadsheet broken down into the following columns:

For the priority column, choose a level of priority from 1 to 5, with 1 being the greatest priority, 5 the least.

one minute wonder Calculate the hourly rate that you are costing your organization:

Take the productive part of each day, which is probably somewhere between 50% and 80% – let’s say 65%.

Say you work 8 hours per day x 65% = 5.2 hours per day that are productive. Say you earn £30,000 per year; then double that to count in benefits and employment overheads = £60k per year.

Divide that by 52 weeks minus 6 weeks for holidays/illnesses = 46 weeks x 5 days x 5.2 hours per day = 1196 hours per year.

Round to 1200 hours and divide £60k by 1200 hours = £50 per hour.

This means that you cost your company or organization £50 for every productive hour you work – an incentive not to waste time!

Recording this level of detail will almost certainly reveal things that you were not aware of about your working day. It may, for example, demonstrate that you spend more time than you had throught in travelling or doing routine tasks (one of my colleagues calculated that he spends a total of 15 minutes every day walking from his computer to the printer and back), or that you spend less time than you should in planning and thinking.

When working out the priority column, consider the following:

Which tasks are central to your role.

Which tasks could be delegated.

Which tasks could be done more effectively.

Which tasks you should not be doing in the first place.

Calculate your time on different tasks and your hourly rate with overheads.

1.5 Get on top of stress (#ulink_ec283d0b-44f9-57a9-bf34-9f7790fdd36e)

If we had no stress in our lives, maybe nothing would get done. But most of us have too much stress – enough to make us read a book about time management! We find ourselves unable to make decisions and we lose a sense of proportion about life as we become more and more burdened.

We become frustrated at how little progress is being made on the project we’ve been working hard at, despite all our efforts. We think we’re too busy even to take a holiday. If such feelings are familiar to you, it is vital that you find ways that work for you to manage and reduce the stress in your life. Here are some guidelines (see also 4.8):

case study In Ron’s first eight years of working independently, he put in extremely long hours. He was often so exhausted that he couldn’t relax even when away from work, and his relationship with his wife and children suffered. His stress built up and took an emotional and physical toll. He eventually realized that he needed to learn how to build a more balanced lifestyle. So Ron scheduled in more family time. He also developed regular habits of walking around the block (5, 10, 20, 40 minutes depending on the time available) and developed a support group of friends who met regularly. He became more resilient and had ‘coping mechanisms’ in place to help him in times of stress.

Schedule in regular times of rest. If you know you’ve got a very busy week, try to make the weekend or the next week less busy.

Learn to say no. Don’t try to control everything in the universe: set yourself realistic goals (see also 5.5).