Kickstart Your Time Management

The Complete Guide to Great Work Habits

by Frances Kay John Wiley & Sons 2003 200 pages

Focus
Leadership & Mgt. Strategy Sales & Marketing Corporate Finance Human Resources Technology & Production Small Business Economics & Politics Industries & Regions Career Development Personal Finance Concepts & Trends

Take-Aways
Time management is more about the tasks you have to do than the time it takes to do them. Good time management habits start with good daily lists. Finish the large tasks on your to-do list before tackling the smaller tasks. To manage your time, rst you need to manage your stress level. Keep your personal and professional life clutter free. The telephone, visiting co-workers, e-mail and excessive paperwork are dangerous time-wasters. The best way to ensure good communication with your colleagues is to build relationships with them. Keep paper to a minimum touch it once and then deal with it immediately. Get to know how to use all of the technology at your disposal. Make sure a meeting is absolutely necessary before agreeing to attend it.

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Relevance
What You Will Learn In this Abstract, you will learn: 1) How to set priorities at home and in the ofce; 2) How to make the most of your time; and 3) How to identify hindrances to effective time management. Recommendation Most likely, if youre interested in achieving time management, youre not interested in spending a lot of your precious time reading about it. English author Frances Kay understands this and she knows her audience. Her succinct, practical guide offers tips and suggestions in such a way that you can open it to any page and glean valuable advice at a glance. Kay digs deeply into building time management skills in the ofce, though she glosses over time management outside the workplace. Although the book contains very few groundbreaking ideas, it does contain several kickstart tips that are very much like proverbs. And like proverbs, they should be taken to heart theyll help you improve your time use. If you feel as if youve lost control of the minutes in your day, getAbstract.com assures you that you can begin the process of taking them back by picking up this book.

Abstract
What is Time Management? Time doesnt discriminate. Regardless of who you are, you cant recoup it once its gone. Your only alternative is to manage the time you have. To be successful at time management, you must be organized and focused. Unlike its name, time management really has little to do with time. Its really about what you need to do, your results and your ability to remain in control. Time management requires acting on each task: do it, delegate it or dump it. Manage your time, and youll have less stress, more accomplishments and fewer res to extinguish. Establish Good Habits Your personality type indicates what type of time manager you are. You may be more people-oriented, a good communicator who is skilled at encouraging teamwork. Or, you may be more task-oriented, someone who nds delegating difcult, but will get the task done. Once you know your propensity, work on your weaknesses and capitalize on your strengths.
Chances are that if you nd it difcult to manage your time, youve slipped into some less-than-desirable habits. Do a few basic things to take back your time:
There is a need for structure, but not at the risk of opportunity.

The ability to make decisions is the best way to combat time management problems.

Hit the big jobs Schedule large jobs and tackle them rst. Once theyre completed, you can t smaller tasks around them. Dont wait If you delay a task because you think itll be easier later, it wont. Keep information together Use one notebook for to-do lists, ideas and notes. Use your peak time Save difcult tasks for your most productive time of day. Delegate Assign work out whenever you can. Set achievable goals Setting too-high expectations and falling short is demoralizing. Make sure your goals are realistic.
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Kickstart Your Time Management

Time management is about action action that may be doing, delegating or dumping.

Create a Productive Environment Find a quiet area to work. If you need to accomplish a difcult task, work somewhere new in the library, in a different ofce or at home. At your desk, switch off your voicemail and dont check e-mail until your task is completed. Get to work an hour earlier. First thing in the morning is a good time to accomplish tasks that you cant get to with the workdays interruptions. Its amazing how much youll accomplish in those extra ve hours a week. Lists: The Key to Success Lists help you focus on which tasks you need to accomplish during the day. Once you write down a task, its harder to avoid. Start your day by creating a list of everything you want to accomplish that day and then prioritizing those tasks as A for rst priority, B for important but not critical and C for tasks that would be nice to accomplish if time allows.
No matter how small the task, write it down. Youll get a tremendous feeling of accomplishment when you cross a completed item off your list. If you have carried an item from one daily list to the next more than ve times, cross it off. Youre never going to accomplish that task anyway. Build in time for unforeseen circumstances. You dont want to forego a great opportunity just because it wasnt on your list, so stay exible.

Effective people deal with problems before they become crises.

Getting Through the Bears When youre hit with a daunting task so big you dont even know where to start, dont tackle the whole thing at once. Break the project up into components with incremental goals along the way. Start by setting a timer and stopping when it goes off. An unpleasant project is much easier to tackle when you know you only have to work on it for 10 minutes. Even if you are tempted to jump from a demanding project to something pleasant, dont. Multi-tasking is usually self-defeating. Always concentrate on one task at a time until youve made signicant progress or completed it. Manage Your Health, Manage Your Time Put simply, if you are always stressed out, you wont be able to manage your time effectively. To keep your stress level under control, become aware of what is causing that stress. Try keeping a diary. Each day write down how you feel happy, sad, frustrated, angry, condent, out of control and then analyze your emotions. To identify problem areas, think over the situations that caused those feelings. Once youve identied the problem, immediately try to x it. If you ignore it and throw yourself into your work instead, youre guaranteed to become more stressed and exhausted, and much less efcient.
If you have these symptoms of stress, deal with them immediately: persistent headaches, uncontrolled emotions, memory loss, dizziness, diminished problem solving skills or persistent heartburn or other intestinal issues. The foremost way to manage stress is by managing your time. Other strategies include learning how to ignore situations that are out of your control, maintaining your health, visualizing success instead of failure, talking about the cause of your stress and taking breaks. Make sure you take your vacation. And laugh, because studies show that laughter lowers your heart rate and blood pressure. Maintaining your personal life is a crucial part of keeping stress in check. Nurture your relationships, read books, exercise, volunteer and allot time to pay your bills and maintain your house. Each day, make time for quiet reection. Consider ways to improve your reactions to challenging situations. All this said, some pressure is good for you.
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Be ruthless with time but gracious with people.

Everyone wants their work to matter, but sometimes they allow it to matter too much.

The main cause of procrastination is that the job is either too big or too daunting.

It can give you the kick in the pants you need to accomplish a task to the best of your ability. Just make sure that the pressure doesnt begin to overwhelm you and force you to lose control.

Keep Clutter to a Minimum Control clutter at work and at home. Dont keep anything thats not absolutely necessary. Be merciless when you nish reading an article, throw it away. If articles sit in your reading pile for more than two weeks, throw them away youre never going to read them. At work, clear your desk completely. Have nothing on it except the project youre working on and the items you need every day.
Simplify your routine. Lay your clothes out the night before; keep your morning routine low maintenance. If you are too busy for housework, hire someone to help you. Keep a contact list of people who perform services that make your life simpler or healthier: a tailor, computer tech, orist, doctors, your accountant and so on. Include anyone and everyone you might ever need to call. Keep this list up-to-date and easy to access.

When the job is both urgent and horrible do it rst!

Disorganization is the ultimate time killer. Instead of spending time on your tasks, you waste it searching through clutter. Pre-empt disaster by maintaining order in your work area. Set aside time regularly to catch up on ling and other administrative tasks. To keep the amount of paper in your life under control, do one of four things with it: 1. 2. 3. 4. Deal with it now Do it immediately. Determine it for an action Set it up for future use; dont return it to the pile. Deposit or le it Put it where it belongs. Discard it If you dont need it today, youre not likely to need it in the future.

Effective stress management is an extension of time management.

Keep Interruptions under Control Depending on your personality, you may nd it hard to resist a chatty colleague, but if you allow co-workers to interrupt, theyll only interrupt more. Cut them off by giving advance warning that you cant be interrupted for a set amount of time. If necessary, hang a do not disturb sign on your door or go work in a different ofce. If someone penetrates your barriers, dont let them get comfortable. Stand up and dont offer them a chair. Be polite, but dont let them steal your time. Dont answer your phone or check e-mails during your allotted work time. Strategically Plan for Success If you dont plan, youre doomed to failure. For effective planning, you need goals, clear lists, concentration and a sense of urgency. Your plan should include:

Long term strategic plan Identify goals; list your priorities in relationship to them. Mid-term Adjust priorities as necessary mid-way through your long-term plan. Weekly Create a weekly to-do list. Block out time to do those tasks. Daily Create a to-do list every day.

If you are trying to make things happen, imagine success not failure.

Relationships Count Unless you have good relationships with your colleagues, you wont succeed at work. Good relationships start with good communication. Poor communication causes mistakes, wasted time and overall confusion. If you are a manager, remember that your staff exists to help you meet your goals. If you dont have a good relationship with them, they wont be enthusiastic about helping you. Display integrity and trust, and keep your
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staff up to speed. When it comes to time management, everyone falls into one of four categories:
One thing you cant recycle is wasted time.

1. Roadrunner Prefers to accomplish tasks quickly, but doesnt care how the tasks get done or who gets run over in the process. 2. Racehorse Accomplishes tasks quickly, but is more sensitive to others. Teamwork is a priority. 3. New pup Focuses on people rather than tasks. Measures success by the ability to please others. 4. Tomcat Loners who prefer to be completely independent. Determining under which category you and each of your colleagues falls in will help you set appropriate expectations appropriately. Avoid HMPs, or high maintenance people, those who do not understand that they are not the only people in your life. HMPs can be family members, friends, colleagues or clients, and they can sap your energy, leaving you stressed and exhausted. To deal with an HMP, set rm boundaries. If someone causes you undue stress, consider severing the relationship.

If you dont take control of your time, someone else is likely to do it for you.

Technology Is Your Friend Maximize your time by learning as much as you can about your technology, not just word processing and e-mail. Learn the latest software packages use your companys IT resources. Keep your computer in optimal working condition. Dont bog down your hard drive with unnecessary data. Keep it as empty as possible to keep it running fast. Make sure your software is the most up-to-date version and always back up important les on a CD. Running only one program at a time will help your computer run more quickly.
E-mail can obliterate your time management efforts. Stay on top of it and clean your in-box daily. Unsubscribe to unnecessary e-mail lists. Dont get caught in the trap of reading e-mails as soon as they land. Schedule specic times in your day for reading e-mail.

Meetings Must Be Managed Some meetings can be extremely useful. Properly managed, they can save time by ensuring that all participants are on the same page and up-to-date. But often, meetings become time wasters. Avoid meetings that start late (and, hence, end late), lack a focused agenda or have participants who dont allow ideas to ow. Prepare thoroughly for any meeting you attend and make sure that you absolutely need to be there otherwise, politely decline.

About The Author

Frances Kay is founder and president of a business solutions consultant rm called Acumen2. As a professional organizer and author, she lectures on organization skills and on issues facing women in the workplace. She lives in Gloucestershire, England.

Kickstart Your Time Management

Copyright 2004 getAbstract

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