Time Management Skills, Tips & Techniques

Overview:

Time management is an essence in our today lives. Without an efficient time management you will end up and many things not completed, Your energy already consumed and you don't have a clear progress in your work. Please note that time management is a very important topic and it is not only related to work or projects you need to manage your time  across your life.

Daily Time Management:

• Maintain a daily TO-Do list to keep track your daily tasks.
• Filter your To-Do tasks remaining from yesterday.
• Add one or tow from your general To-Do list to your daily list.
• Check your organization main objective list and check how your To-Do list is linked or mapped to those objectives.
• Prioritize your TO-Do list  using 80-20 rule. This is means, find the 20 % of tasks that will achieve around 80% of your work required today.
• Spend 15 min at end of each day to assess your performance during the day. 
• After that meeting, write down in an external maintained list what went good and what is went bad. This will help you to build your own time management techniques.
• At the end of the day, move all your remaining To-Do list items to tomorrow To-Do list.

Daily Time Monitoring:

Some time your day end up with many unaccomplished tasks even if you worked so hard and if you feel that you was very busy during the day. In this case you may need to monitor your time consumed during the day and try to reach to a set of patterns or bad activities that consumes your time. Then you can build your own technique to tackle those patterns or to change your behavior to be more productive. find below how to monitor your time.

• Build a small table that can be used to note down the following:
• Activity ID
• Activity Name
• Start Time
• End Time
• Duration
• Activity type
• Flag (Related to work)
• Start writing down the time consumed in every single task you have. the more accurate you are the most valuable results you will get at the end.
• Do this for 2 or 3 random days.
• Analyse the data you already collected

Find below some findings from research and people experience:

• Multitasking is one of the most reasons that consumes your time. our brains not build to multitask. So you need to identify task or item and focus on completing it. Research proves that you spend time when you try to switch your brain between tasks. your quality will be reduces as well. so hope that you got it. focus on one thing till you complete it and remove it from your To-Do list for ever.
• External interruption consumes your time. Like phone calls, unplanned meetings, monitoring e-mails, unexpected customer visits...etc. To handle this find another some tips:
• Book a specific time to read your e-mails and for your phone calls. For example every 1 to 2 hours spend 15 min to filter your important e-mails and take 1 hour at the end of the day to reply your e-mails and forward it to your team. you can also Book 2 hours per day to receive phone calls.
• When you have critical task that need focus and concentration to accomplish, Switch off your mail and phone.
• Coming to work late is one of the disasters. It will destroy your day. Because you will try to catch up and you will lose your focus and will reduce your productivity.
• Try to have a sufficient sleeping hours. It will help you to have a clear brain and mind.

Meeting Time Management:

Many people come late to their meetings. This is unprofessional behavior and shows lack of respect to the others. If you under estimate your time value, then don't waist the other's .  Find below some tricks to help you to manage your meeting time:

Before meeting:

• Prepare meeting agenda and share it with other meeting attendee.
• Share any other files required along with meeting agenda.
• Book specific time to address every topic in your agenda.
• Make a small plan if required to estimate the time required to reach the meeting room. Find below a small example:
• Meeting in another building that needs around 10 Min to be there.
• I need 5 min to get off the building and reach my car.
• I need 5 extra Min to find parking slot at that area.
• I need extra 5 min to take the left and reach 5th floor- room 502 [meeting room]
• give additional 5 min backup in case if there is an accident or traffic jams.
• Total time required to reach that meeting on time: 30 Min.
• If my meeting at 1:30 PM then i need to leave at 1:00 PM.

During meeting

• Try to stick to meeting agenda.
• Avoid any external topics.
• Try to stick to time slots assigned to each agenda topic.
•  Write the actions along with action taker / owner.

After Meeting:

• Share minutes of meetings with all attendee.
• Share actions table with your attendee:
• Action Description
• Owner
• Target Date.
• Follow up on actions required and hold any required meeting to tackle any issue.