Managing Your Time

Action Learning Campus offers a range of seminars and courses including Time Management & Work-Life Balance. You'll find a few hints and tips further down the page which are taken from our Time Management booklet, and form the introduction to our 1/2 day seminars.

"What comes first, the compass or the clock? Before one can truly manage time (the clock), it is important to know where you are going, what your priorities and goals are, in which direction you are headed (the compass). Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going. Rather than always focusing on what's urgent, learn to focus on what is really important".
 
Source Unknown

Why should I manage myself and my time?

After a month of using the techniques you'll be much more effective and you'll have the time to do the things you want to. How often have you taken an afternoon off work and managed to cram in 8 hours work into four hours? We can all do it when we work through things in an organised and planned way.
 
Claim your life back by using your time more effectively.Taking on any new information, and learning new techniques that probably contradict everything you have done in the past, isn't easy. It will take some self discipline and determination but I promise you it will be worth it. You'll also know what you want to achieve with your time, otherwise what is the point of freeing up time and then wasting it?

Laziness - most of us are lazy. It is more fun to do the things I like rather than the things I have to do.

If you are brutally honest with yourself, isn't that what most of us actually do? How many of us save the difficult jobs for last and then spend all weekend working on it? It's like a small child who saves the food they like to eat until last and then has a lasting impression of a horrible meal. If they'd cut the food into small pieces and ate it with everything else the unpleasant taste would have been masked and probably not even noticed at all. In project management they say "How do you eat an elephant? You do it by cutting it in to small, manageable pieces".

I will do my Time Management course, but after I've finished dealing with the crisis (and the next one, and the next one).

The big problem here is that you will keep putting it off again and again if I let you. So here is the deal, you work through the course now and have the time to deal with this, and future crisis, properly and without working yourself into the dust.

My office is organised and tidy, my filing system works well so I must be effective. While it's great that your office is organised and very tidy - did you spend time on this and ignore something else of more importance to achieve it? Please don't confuse the appearance of being organised with actually being organised. There really is a big difference between the two.   If you can lay your hands on the dozen or so most important pieces of paper/files that you are working on at the moment, then it doesn't matter whether they are in a fantastic, neat filing system or in a tray on your desk - what matters is that it works for you and that you can find what you want, when you want.   Remember that you need to be able to dig out some paperwork more quickly than others - so don't bury important information where it takes the same amount of time to find as something you only need to look at once a year. Make sure your paperwork is filed in a logical way (and by that I mean logical to you!). My own office isn't tidy - but it does have a system and it's easy to find all the core information I need quickly!

What Steals my Time?

For anyone to be effective with their time, they need to identify all the things that "steal" their time away from them. Most people will come up with more or less the same list and to help you start with yours, I've noted a few of the common "time-theives" below.

• Interruptions - drop in visitors, telephones, impromptu meetings 
• Planning Meetings - the kind that are not controlled and frequently over run without achieving anything 
• Simple Tasks - the kind of thing that you should really have delegated (given it to someone else to do!) 
• Procrastination - never do today what you can put off till tomorrow! 
• Failure to Make Decisions - thinking about something (or avoiding it altogether) for so long and failing to make a decision either way 
• Fools Rush In - rushing to act quickly when you don't know all the facts and information that you need to do the right thing 
• Fire Fighting and Fire Lighting - most of us when in crisis don't look up to see what's going on around us, and whilst fighting one fire, can easily be lighting another as we go along our merry way 
• Poor Communications - Jimmy has made a mess of this task - is it because you didn't communicate what you actually wanted to him in a manner which he actually understood? 
• Inadequate Knowledge - by this I mean raw technical or practical knowledge as to how something should/could/would be done. 
• No Objectives and No Priorities - are your priorities dealing with the person who shouted loudest at you this morning so that you get them off your back or do you make a proper list each day and decide on what Must, Should and Can be done and in What Order? 
• Planning - fail to plan and plan to fail! 
• Tiredness and Stress - when we're under stress we don't perform as well - if you're tired then do something about it. 
• I'm just a girl/boy who can't say NO! - how often do we take on too much work because we don't want to say No to the Boss or the person who is asking us? 
• Clutter, Rubbish and Disorganistion - Tidy up so that you can at least find what is important, See the point higher up the page about Desk Tidiness. 

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