Free Time Management Skills Tutorial

Goal Setting
Time management skills and goal setting. Many people with clear ambitions and aspirations in life fail to achieve any of them. Managing is supposed to be about achieving the long-term goals of the organization and yet the overwhelming pressure on most people is to handle day-to-day tasks efficiently. The main barrier to turning ambitions into achievements is the reactive nature of much of what we have to do.

Reactive work is driven by events and other people, whilst a proactive approach is one aimed at making things happen. Reactive work can be classified as the operational side of the operations and management split, whilst proactive represents the truly managerial component. There is a great deal of organizational pressure on managers to be responsive and short term in their thinking, often their superiors want instant reaction and quick results. Don’t forget that people tend to do what they get rewarded for.

Being proactive is a far better time management skills approach than being reactive. This means anticipating events and being in a position to take appropriate action as soon as the right moment arrives. Proactive people look ahead and predict the likely outcome of events as they unfold.

Defining Your Goals
The next step is to select those ideas that you wish to address, and turn them into a goal linked to a specific deadline. Without a deadline a goal is often no more real than a new years resolution, and we all have experience of their level of success. A good idea is to create SMART goals. This acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time bound.

The process of turning an aspiration into a goal is crucially important to their achievement. It is the successful attainment of goals that will ultimately lead to your aspirations being achieved. It is the goals that represent concrete targets, which in turn will dictate your day-to-day activities. It is your goals that will help you, maybe even force you, to change your old time-wasting habits and develop effective time management skills.

It is only a clear sense of direction that will ensure you avoid drifting into short-term efficiency at the expense of long term effectiveness - and that is the real key to being a successful time manager.

Planning Your Day
An essential time management skill is the ability to recognize the need to plan periods of time when you can concentrate on the main demands of your job. Few people even take time at the end of the previous day to plan what they want to achieve the following day. More typically they seek inspiration in their diaries or seek refuge in routine tasks, like reading their post and e-mail, and wait for the first meeting or interruption to set them on a path for the rest of the day.

This lack of planning doesn't only apply to day-to-day activities. Few people have a monthly plan, long-term goals or a vision for the future. However planning nearly always tops the list when managers are asked what they need to make more time for.

People frequently refer to the sheer volume of interruptions that they suffer when trying to justify their lack of achievement. With an interruption occurring, on average, every 7 minutes, managers have to do their work between distractions. Whilst each interruption may not seem to take up much time, they can typically account for 25% of a working day and make it very difficult to address tasks that require concentrated effort.

The effect of allowing interruptions to continually distract you is likely to undermine your efforts to plan your working day. One solution is to batch up the interruptions that you cant avoid and to set aside time slots during your working day when you can break off and address them. For example, you could set aside 20 minutes before lunch and half an hour before the end of each working day to address all the interruptions that have occurred in each half of the day.

Urgency & Importance
The urgency/importance grid is an effective way of categorizing and prioritizing tasks (it is dealt with later in this tutorial). This gives rise to three different types of task A, B and C.

   

Type A tasks are those that are both important and urgent.
Type B tasks are those that are either important or urgent, but not both.
Type C tasks are those that are neither important nor urgent.

When it comes to scheduling tasks into your working day, the following guidelines should be borne in mind.

A-tasks. Try to complete a few of these urgent and important tasks each day.
B-tasks. These are likely to represent the majority of your work and should take up most of your day.
C-tasks. These low-priority tasks should be fitted into your schedule, as time allows.

A typical working day will include a mixture of all three types of task. It is good practice to address different types of task at various times of the day - rather than working through all the A-tasks, followed by the B-tasks, then the C-tasks. This will enable you to have periods of the day when you are concentrating intensely, followed by periods where you can address less demanding tasks.

Nearly everybody is subject to performance fluctuations throughout the working day. At certain times you will feel particularly energetic and alert, whilst at others you feel tired. If you can tune-in to your own daily cycles then you will be able to plan the optimum times at which to tackle the different types of task – another important time management skill.

Whilst there are some quite dramatic individual variations, the majority of people feel most energetic and alert during the middle to late morning period and again in the middle to late afternoon. Conversely, most people suffer troughs soon after lunch, and again towards the end of the day.

Effective Use of a Planner
A planner, or scheduler, is a centralized inventory of your known future commitments and your unfinished work. It should be organized systematically and held in one folder, or on a computer, so that authorized staff can see your future commitments. This enables teams to work more effectively together when scheduling or delegating work.

You need to control access to your planner carefully. Only trusted colleagues should have access to it; otherwise you may find yourself working around the needs of others, rather than the needs of your job. Don't be afraid to reschedule planned tasks for those with a higher priority, as and when these arise.

It is also important not to appear to have spare time in your schedule when you don't – this is often overlooked but is a vital time management skill. In particular, make sure that your schedule includes sufficient time for travel between appointments and a contingency for overruns, where this is likely. Also, include all batched activities like making outbound phone calls and any regular commitments such as monthly meetings.

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