Making every moment count

Are you forever racing against time to meet deadlines? Does your most common refrain happen to be “so much to do and so little time”? If you have answered in the affirmative to both questions, chances also are you just can’t get through that to-do list stuck neatly to your work station. Your unfinished tasks are overwhelming you and are also jeopardising your career.

“Time management is something we look forward to in a manager. This is because time management could be a reflection of how good a manager you are,” says Suresh Tripathi, President (HR), SRF. Here’s how: Apart from the productivity part of it, good time managers put less stress on the system that others are also part of.

How to get the most out of your time? Founder of Professional Skills Alliance, Melissa Raffoni, recommends you leverage and audit your time. And no, it does not mean spending more time to manage time! She cites an example—Do you get more leverage from doing work yourself or from training a team of others? The message: Get the biggest return from the time spent.

Suggested reading Eat that frog! Brian Tracy 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time

The first step in doing so, according to Raffoni, is auditing how you spend your time for one week. “This one-week time management assessment gives you a snapshot of how you actually spend your time. Keeping track of your hours for a week is not difficult.” Raffoni promises that the results are often surprising. Rather than covering all your activities, you could conduct an audit of the tasks that are most important for you. Audit your personal time as well to get the complete picture. To record time spent at work, make a chart— Raffoni calls it Baseline Time Management Audit Tool. List the days of the week down the rows. Across the top of columns list the major categories that you spend time on. These could be sales, team management, customer management, mentoring, administration, etc. At the end of the day and at the end of the week, add the total hours spent on each category. After a week of the audit, ask yourself—Is this how I want to spend my time?

Confront delays Procrastination symptom: Perfection Do you find it difficult to complete tasks because you want everything to be ‘just right’? Possible solution: Let it go Time is more important than perfection. Ask yourself— ”Is it worth my effort?” Procrastination symptom: eadline High Do you delay work because you find it stimulating to work against a deadline? Possible solution: Tighter Scheduling Create a schedule and stick to it— especially if you are on a team Reclaim control over your time Prioritise and delegate. Reduce time spent on low-priority work Have deadlines. Create to-do lists with time estimates Be disciplined. Complete one task before moving on to another Source: Managing Time (Harvard Business School Press)