10 Terrific Time Management Tips

Author: Sana Bagersh

Ten Terrific Time Management Tips Everyone Can Use

1.Prepare a daily to-do list and stick by it. Ideally you can put this together the day before so that you are already primed into action from the get go the following morning. Take pleasure in ticking off tasks done on time and reward yourself with rejuvenating breaks before you get into your next work activity.

2.Be disciplined about office chitchat. Don't be side tracked by idle talk with colleagues. While some interaction is healthy and desirable, excessive socializing can throw your work targets off. Learn to be firm with friends and colleagues by saying "while I would love to socialize with you, I have some work that needs attending to." Or you could alternately suggest that you get together after work to chat at leisure.

3.Identify time wasters. Learn to scrutinize your typical day and zone in to those activities that take more time than they are worth. Study a few of your days—possibly even chart your work patterns and the daily distractions—and come up with suitable remedies to eliminate time wasters from your work day.

4.Be sure to replenish your office materials ahead of time. Manage your stocks and inventory, reordering ahead of time, so that you won't waste time in the future waiting for your stocks to arrive.

5.Break down your multiple tasks by level of priority. Divide your work so that you have ‘hot' immediate issues to take care of now, and ‘back burner' issues that you can tend to in bursts whenever you have the time. Learn to be an efficient multi-tasker and you will find that you're always on ‘top of things'.

6.Turn your mobile phone on silent, or off. The biggest distraction of our time is our mobile phone, forever encroaching on our every activity. Learn to turn it off when you're engaged in serious work, so that you will not lose your focus. Having the discipline to focus also means telling your secretary to take messages for you while you are busy.

7.Pay attention to your body rhythm. Capitalize on your most productive peaks. If you are a morning person, tend to your most challenging tasks in the morning, or if you're an afternoon person, use your morning time for more mundane, less mental-intensive work.

8.Be shrewd when managing time. If you want to avoid long meetings schedule them right before lunch or the end of day, and most people will be more inclined to brevity in order to get away. If you want to avoid pointless meetings, then cancel them, and change the communication direction in favour of other options such as memos or email. Most meetings, if not properly managed, are unnecessary time wasters for all those involved.

9.Cut down on external appointments. If you receive a lot of salespeople hawking their wares, ask them to send you profiles or their proposals by email so you have time to evaluate it before committing to a meeting. Do this only if you believe the visitor may be of value, and not as a pretext to avoid them. If you're not interested, then you should be direct and honest in voicing this to the party that requested the meeting.

10.Don't spend too much time with email. Another perennial time waster is email. Only go through the ones you know are important (you can determine this by seeing who the sender is, or by viewing the subject matter). Don't indulge in back and forth email exchanges when a quick phone call will do. And whatever you do, don't install a chat programme like MS Messenger as that means a whole bunch of unsolicited distractions.

About the Author:
Sana Bagersh is CEO of BrandMoxie, a marketing agency that specializes in branding, strategy, PR and events. Visit BrandMoxie's site at www.brandmoxie.com.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com