Here are some general hints and tips for effective time management, give some a try.
Two tools I’ve used include, turning off my email and putting my phone on silent for an hour when I am working on a proposal helps me not get distracted and focus on the task at hand better. Just turning off the bing when a new email is received also revolutionised the way I work, I wouldn’t get tempted to check it every ten minutes.
Experiment a little…
– Write to-do lists with a weekly focus for each day (not just a daily focus).
– Write a to-do list the night before so you come into work knowing your first priority.
– Block out time in your diary to ‘do’ work and name what it is you’ll be doing in that time.
– Ask your Manager/ staff to help you out, tell them when you need to complete something and ask them to check in with you or not interrupt you.
– Chunk your time, only respond to emails 3 times a day (morning, lunch and towards the end).
– Reward yourself when you finish a task by getting up and moving around, a quick walk or drink of water, tea or coffee. Take regular breaks to re-charge allows you to work more effectively.
– Use gaps between meetings and while travelling to respond to emails, given we’re all using smart phones these days it allows us to use the time at our desk to do work.
– Clear your desk at the end of each day, so you’re coming into a cleared space each morning, often a cluttered desk is a signal of a cluttered mind.
– Invest the time upfront to set up folders and your system for filing – on your desk, on your server and in your email system. Take an hour at the end of the week/ month to update and clear these up.
– Delete/ file emails once they are actioned.
Would love to know any hints and tips you have on how to manage time more effectively, feel free to share!
As the article suggests, time management is all about keeping track of things that need to be done. A lot of people end up wasting time or not getting things done not because they are struggling with time management but because it is just too hard to track all that needs to get done. Despite all the innovation in information technology, calendars and to-do-lists are tedious and unintuitive for most people to use. Over 2B people use email but a tiny fraction use calendars and to-do-lists. For example, lot of things we need to get done come through email and get buried under other email – e.g. a meeting request, spouse’s reminder. Or they may pop in our heads at a random times. It is not convenient to pull out a calendar or to-do-list to put it on there. Just the # of clicks it takes to enter an appointment is arduous.
It is much more natural to “tell” it to someone to get reminded about it – e.g. text it, send an email. Probably, why busy (and rich) people hire personal assistants. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t that rich but as Drucker points out, are having to deal with the same executive’s challenge.
We have created a service: https://www.joggleme.com to do exactly that. It makes calendars, to-do-lists and time management as simple as sending an email or a text message to your free personal assistant.
Please check it out and give us feedback.
Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/08/28/time-management-bloomberg-style/#ixzz2e3dCDQGy