Get More Time Out Of Your Day Today and Enjoy a Profitable Tomorrow
When you are in the business world, it seems there is never time enough in the day to do everything you need to do. And with the speed of communications speeding up with the advent of the internet, email and instant messaging, that problem is getting worse instead of better. To have any hope of taking control over your business life, you must employ some principles of time management as part of a management training, corporate training or business training that return control over your working day to you.
The heart of time management is making your schedule work for you instead of you working for it. That is going to take some discipline on your part and some new ways of interacting with coworkers, outside contacts and even management. But the outcome will be a business day that is far more productive than you ever thought was possible. And productivity in your working day means you will be more successful in your job and a better employee for your boss. So any steps that can be taken to give you the structure you need to be productive is a good one.
Too often, we think that if we can just work long hours, weekends and holidays and sacrifice family and rest time, we can get control over the lack of time in the day to get things done. This is a disastrous approach to time management because by sacrificing the time you need to “recharge your battery”, you will damage your ability to be productive in the long run. That doesn?t benefit you or your employer and it can cause real harm to your family and personal relationships. No employer who sees the employees as a long term resource would demand that kind of commitment.
Instead, there is a way to step back and look objectively at your day to determine what it is that is stealing most of your time. Then by reorganizing how you do your work, you can systematically take control over those time thieves, which will return those hours to you. Only when you become the boss of your schedule will you be able to capture and sustain that kind of control.
Project Schedules That Make Sense
It is likely that the first step toward getting better control over the time you are paid to work at your job will be to enlist the cooperation of your boss and coworkers. A team meeting or a serious of one on one meeting with the people you interact the most with to discuss your objective of getting control over your day may surface that everybody in the organization is suffering from the same types of problems. Like a good diet plan, if everybody in your department sets out on a program of time management, it is easier for everybody to become a success.
In addition to working in a shared manner toward the common good, the way your work is scheduled should be reviewed with an eye on controlling the flow of work coming to your schedule. If you have three projects that are high priority and that are demanding your full attention already, you must take the initiative to “just say no” to that fourth project if it means all of your work will suffer.
This is going to take some courage and some backbone as well as support from your management. But by being honest with those who wish to enlist your skills on projects that are in need of attention, you can lay it on the line that if the new project is going to get priority attention, another already active project will have to be put on hold.
To get this kind of management over your work schedule requires that you have a firm understanding of what kind of impacts new work will have on your schedule. Based on that and working with management, to then limit the quantity of work that can be accommodated in a routine workday will result in work schedules that make sense.
Before long, the idea that you can be overloaded and that such overloading is not feasible will become part of the corporate culture of the organization. If others in your department are building similar controls on their schedules, the outcome will be a business that runs itself in a more disciplined fashion as well as one with employees who are far more productive because their schedules are managed and manageable at the same time.
Getting Out Ahead Of Interruptions
The discipline we discussed earlier of stepping back from your day to understand where your interruptions are coming from can be quite revealing. A way to take that discipline to the next level is to actually log every activity of your working day for a week. If you are on the phone with a work associate but the content of the call is gossip, log that. If you go to coffee and end up in the break room for a half hour discussing football, log that.
When you finish a week or two of logging every interruption as well as logging times of productivity, the outcome can be quite startling. For most of us, we spend far more time engaging others in nonproductive work during our working day. This is a particularly nagging problem in an office environment where there are a lot of people in a small amount of space.
The key to getting out ahead of interruptions is not to just shut down office relationships and try to go without that social contact. Humans are by nature social animals so to do that would hurt your working relationships which is not healthy. Instead, put some structure to the time you spend in social conversation with work associates. Once again, by letting people you are on a friend level with at the work place of your plan to keep that friendship active but to take control over the time you allocate for social relationships, you may find they have the same problem and that they wish to join you in this discipline.
By scheduling regular lunch or coffee time with significant friendships in the office, you add a layer of control over your office chats but you return to your schedule longer periods of uninterrupted productivity time. The outcome is you still get your social needs met but you are a better and more productive worker.
Family and Friends
Finally, one of the most difficult interruptions to get control over are phone calls from family and friends. But if you pay attention to your coworkers, you may notice that not everybody in the office takes multiple phone calls from home or from friends outside of the office. It might be that this is an area of life where you could also impose some discipline if you muster the courage to do so.
Many of us revere our private relationships so much that we simply refuse to impose some order on when family and friends can call and how long the conversation can go on. But if you sit down with your spouse, parents or children and explain that they can reach you at work but the calls need to be concerning a need and not just social, those calls will drop off quickly.
You can still take time on your break or at lunch to call friends and family and get caught up. You may be surprised how much people who care about you want to help you be a success at work. If they realize that their phone calls are creating a productivity problem for you, they will be happy to do all they can to make you more successful at work.
Just as your boss, your coworkers and others in the work place can see the value of creating order in your schedule and making your working hours productive, others will join the quest for greater productivity with you. And when your social support network gets behind you to get more time out of your day, you will be assured of success in your time management program.
