Steps toward Effective Time Management

Does it always seem like you are under the gun to get things done?  Time seems to get away from you and you don’t know why.  Maybe what you need is a way to effectively manage your time.

Time management is an age-old problem.  Remember Wimpy in the old Popeye cartoons?  He’d pay on Tuesday for a hamburger today.  Why not pay now?  Procrastination is the enemy of all who try to manage their time.  If you have been bitten by the procrastination bug, it’s time to take an antidote.

Time management issues can be dealt with in three stages:  planning, tracking and assessing.  Just like with other issues in life, the best way to handle them is head on, before the problem gets to be too big for us to even want to look at it.

1.  Planning – Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.  We’ve all heard it and it’s true for the most part.  You have to have somewhere to start or you’ll spend half of your day deciding what to do.  Planning begins with the end – deadlines.  Know how much time you have for each task you have to accomplish.  Within that timeline, you can break down the larger goal into more manageable pieces. 

This method is less of a drain on your resources and your brain.  Use a planning tool like a calendar.  The calendar, preferably a computerized one, needs to have the capability of looking at a several views:  daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.  Use the calendar to map out work and personal tasks so that nothing gets overlooked.

2.  Tracking – How are you using your time?  Use tracking software to monitor how much time is spent on business projects and how much is devoted to each project.  Tracking lets you see where time is being lost.  Maybe it takes too long to do the research for a project or the final organization of it.

If your desk is unorganized, you could be losing what amounts to hours just trying to find what you need.  Time tracking software allows you to create categories for the way that you spend your time so you can easily follow.  If you don’t want to make that investment, create a time tracking spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel to prioritize tasks each day and track the time you work on them.

3.  Assessing – So, where did the time go?  Are you spending more time on minimum priority projects and less time on high priority ones, or is it vice versa?  Take a look at where you are developing black holes of lost time.  On your logs, choose a place for comments about what exactly you did during the time spent on each category during the day.  If writing up a proposal is supposed to take two hours but it is taking you four, what is being missed?

It is easy for time to escape us.  For a business, time is money that you are losing.  Re-evaluate how you spend your time and tighten up on projects that are taking too long.