Time Management

Written by Prisca Ajayi

Have you ever heard anyone say “There’s not enough time in a day to get everything done”, or have you yourself said that before looking at your workload or your to do list?
Unfortunately, we all have only 24hrs in a day and if we were to separate the working hours, most of us have 8-10hrs to get through our to do list.

Over the years as a Manager and Director, I have seen people work 10hrs and not achieve as much as someone who work only 5hrs.  This is to show you that it is not always about how many hours we have, it’s more about how we manage the hours that we have, how we manage our time.

Within Leadership and Management courses, time management is a key module and that is because experts have understood that not everyone knows how to manage their time effectively.

How do you manage your time? Are your time management skills good?  Only you can answer this question by reflecting on your productivity on a daily basis.

Good time management takes a shift in focus from activities to results. Being busy isn’t the same as being effective. In fact, for many people, the busier they are, the less they actually achieve.  Some of the benefits of good time management are:

• Higher productivity
• Meet targets and deadline
• Provides focus on important activities
• Reduce likelihood of diary clashes and double booking
• Provides clarity of work to be done and timescales
• Creates time for planning and non-urgent activities
• Less stress
• Good work life balance
• Healthier

It is important you review your routine and identify the “time wasters” in your life, what eats into your time.  There are so many things or even people who steal our time without us knowing, some examples are:

• Mobile phone
• Social media
• Gossiping
• Coffee break
• Smoking break
• Saying yes
• Emails
• Socialising with co-workers
• Wasted Meetings

There are many Time management techniques that can help you manage your time better and one of my favourite one is:

It is not everything that is your list that needs to be done today, you need to be able to go through them and re-organise them in order of priority and urgency so you can then decide what to do with each one of them using the 4Ds of time management above. 

If you do not start to manage your time better today, your to do list will manage your time and control what you do, take control and start planning and organising your list and get rid of time wasters, as your time is too precious for them!