Use these time management techniques for prioritising and scheduling your time

There are many time management techniques available to make real change in how you manage your time. Tools that worked for me are described here.

TO DO Lists

Lots of people keep daily To Do Lists of tasks they have to complete. But are they working for you? Here are some rules to make your To Do Lists really effective.

Allow a half hour each morning to examine the list of tasks you have to complete. Research has shown that one minute spent planning saves ten minutes of your time!

Are your tasks manageable in the day, or do you need to break them down into smaller tasks over a longer period?

time management techniques

Classify them as follows:

A: Must Do; B: Should do; C: Nice to do;
D: Delegate; E: Eliminate

To Do lists become ineffective when people class all their tasks as 'A'. They often become disillusioned at the end of the day, when their list is often longer than when they started!

To make better use of your To Do list, transfer your tasks into the following time management quadrant. Classify the tasks according to their degree of urgency and importance.

time management techniques

Do you feel you spend your time going from one crisis to another? it may be that you are not including enough of the important but less urgent tasks in your daily to do list.

Time spent planning ahead or building relationships can often reduce the amount of firefighting you end up doing - and the number of tasks that end up in the urgent/important quadrant.

Scheduling your Time

Scheduling is one of the best time management tools you can use. Get yourself a good diary, and schedule your day into half hour blocks.

You can classify most of your tasks into two types:

Maintenance tasks (such as weekly departmental meetings, end of month reports) or

Progress tasks which allow you to change or improve (such as goal setting, attending training courses)

Schedule both of these into your diary along with time for thinking about your To Do list, checking emails and so on.

See the example below:

time management techniques

To make your schedule work, don't plan more than 50% of your time. Allow flexibility for those unexpected emergencies, and then you won't get disillusioned with your time management plan.

So, your schedule tells you what you should be doing at any particular time..

and your daily To Do list sets your priorities.

To hear answers to the key concerns that managers often have about managing their time, download the Time Management Skills Audio Guide and Workbook. The workbook contains a wide range of time management worksheets, time management logs and time management exercises.

The Importance of Time Management page helps you to get focused on making better use of your time.

Visit the Time Management in the Workplace page to learn specific time management techniques for your time at work.

Dealing with Time Wasters gets you focused on what wastes your time and what to do about it.

Invest in a good diary and make your To Do list and schedule accessible. For a time management diary that can be designed to meet your specific needs, I recommend Day Timers.

If you want to have some fun and improve your time management techniques at the same time, click here to play free Time Management games.

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