Time Tips
The value of time management
Analysing your time usage: Where does the time go?
Setting work goals
Importance and Urgency Matrix
Prioritising and the 20:80 Rule
The difference between being effective and being efficient
The value of time management
There are many benefits of time management. The list below identifies what major benefits you can gain by improving your time management practice.
- Achieve more of your goals
- Waste less time
- Avoid feelings of frustration
- Reduce work stress
- Avoid confusion in the workplace
- Complete projects
- Reduce time spent re-organising
- Make better decisions
- Operate more effectively as a Leader
- Spend more time on really important matters rather than trivial ones
- Reduce the need to correct mistakes
- Meet deadlines
- Delegate more effectively
- Reduce crisis management
- Avoid procrastination
- Become more self disciplined
Analysing your time usage: Where does the time go?
Everyone has his or her own strengths and weaknesses in time management. Also everyone has different demands on their time and different things they have to achieve.
Because everyone is different it's a good idea to analyse your own time usage.
Here are some points to help you analyse your own time use
- What kind of work do you do?
- How much control do you have over setting goals and priorities in your work?
- Do your goals and priorities change very frequently? How often (Hourly, daily, weekly etc). What impact does this have on your time management?
- What are the most important things you have to achieve in your work?
- What are your strengths in time management - what do you do well?
- What areas do you need to improve in your time management?
- What are your greatest time wasters or frustrations in time management?
- What are the three most important things you would like to do to improve your time management?
Setting work goals
A SMART process for setting SMART goals
Goal setting generally starts by deciding on some major outcomes and then setting some sub-goals which helps you achieve them. This process may continue by setting further mini goals to help you achieve those sub-goals. Unless you are clear on the goals that you want to achieve it is very hard to manage your time effectively. The goals give you the criteria by which you can evaluate how well you are managing your time.
SMART Goals
- Specific
- Measured
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Timed
FMI research has identified five key characteristics of effective goals. We call these SMART Goals because of the first letters of each of the characteristics:
1. Specific
Goals must be specific, not vague. "Improve customer service" sounds good but is not specific enough to be a goal. "Improve customer service by reducing phone waiting time to 5 seconds" is much more specific. Often general goals are further broken down into more specific ones as you cascade down the organisation. Goals should be clear, short and positive.
2. Measured
Having a form of measurement in a goal makes it more specific and progress can be judged. Measures might include dollars, time, number of incidences of an event, speed of response etc. Measurement means that progress towards the goal is also trackable.
Add target dates to all work goals.
Goals must be recorded in writing. This means they can be checked at the time of development for accuracy. They can be referred to by many people. They can also be referred back to in the future.
3. Achievable
Goals must be achievable given the resources and the time frame that will be given to them. However a goal should not be too easily achievable but should be a tough goal. By "tough" we mean goals must be challenging or a "stretch". Goals that are not demanding don't lead to improvements in performance and are certainly not inspiring.
On the other hand goals should be realistic; if they are set too high they are not achievable and can be demotivating. Sometimes setting the level of a goal's demands can be a difficult call for a manager to make.
People must be able to take up the challenge of a goal and commit to the goal.
4. Relevant
A goal must be relevant to the overall aims of the organisation or the team. Work goals must also add value to the organisation. They should improve what is delivered by the organisation.
5. Timed
Goals must have a predetermined completion time against which progress can be checked. For longer termed goals milestones or set points on the way should also be identified by date.
Importance and Urgency Matrix
There are two key aspects to be taken into account when prioritising tasks. These are:
o Importance
o Urgency
An importance/urgency matrix can show how these two aspects interact.
Principles of using the importance/urgency matrix.
1. Focus on the important issues rather than those that are merely urgent.
2. Try to reduce the number of urgent but unimportant items by better
advanced planning.
This way you cut out a lot of unnecessary fire fighting.
3. Avoid the temptation to do the low importance, low urgency items first
simply because there is less psychological pressure involved with them.
4. Review your matrix on a weekly basis and use it to transfer items to your
diary.
If items are of high importance but not getting done review very carefully
what you are doing with them.
5. Don't allow high importance, low urgency items to remain on the list
until they become a high urgency item. Invest your time now in these
items for a future return.
Prioritising and the 20:80 Rule
One of the key principles of time management practice is known as the Pareto Principle or 20:80 Rule. This states that 20% of work you do generally provides 80% of the results. Once you have identified this key 20% you would be wise to spend more of your effort and time in this area.
An Italian economist called Pareto found that in many cases there is a small proportion of the effort put into achieving something that produces a majority of the results. As an example, for most businesses 20% of their customers provide 80% of their sales income.
For time management this means that if we concentrate our efforts on those activities that bring us most return we will be more effective than if we spread our efforts evenly.
Put most effort and most time into those things that give you most return. Spend 80% of your time on the 20% of important activities.
The difference between being effective and being efficient
Efficiency
Efficiency is the ratio between the effort put into a system and the outputs which are achieved.
Engineers measure the efficiency of an engine, for example as:
So for a system to be 100% efficient the output must equal the input.
Technological advances are generally more efficient than previous systems. For example a fax is quicker and cheaper than a letter. An email sent by computer modem is even quicker to use.
Efficiency is an important aspect of time management. The quicker and easier we can do something the more time we save.
However it is possible to be very efficient at what we do but not really achieve results that are worthwhile. For example I may be very efficient at maintaining a piece of equipment that requires constant maintenance and repair. Yet no matter how efficient I may be, I may be wasting my time and energy. It may be more effective to replace the equipment with a newer type that needs minimal repair and maintenance.
So efficiency is not the only thing we must consider in time management. We have to consider also the effectiveness of what we are doing.
Effectiveness
Effectiveness is about achieving our goals in the best possible way. We can only really be effective when we select specific goals and move towards them.
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