Time Management Secrets for Business

There are numerous ways to manage your time more effectively; however, few people are going to tell you how to do it because it is something that they enjoy.

There is nothing laudable about a person who is good at time management if everybody else on the planet is too.

Here is some advice about managing your time that may seem simple, but it is the basis of all good time management situations.

Planning Is The Key To Successful Time Management

People who are good at planning their time are often organized. But, what you may not know is that they are organized because they are good planners.

And, the key to being a good planner is being able to stick to a plan and see it through to the end.

You need to plan your tasks and plan your day if you want to manage your time effectively. Also, you need to monitor your time too, since no plan can be improved if there is no monitoring device and/or results.

Your plan should be made up of goals and tasks, and each one should be broken down into smaller tasks that may be timed.

Planning your time based upon how long you think certain tasks will take is only effective if you can monitor that time and then amend your future plans.

Learn To Judge How Long a Task Takes So You Can Plan For It

People who are good at time management may already be good at judging how long a task will take. You however will have to learn, and the only way you can learn is to start timing your tasks.

You need to make notes on how long certain tasks take you, and then you need to start recording how long the tasks take you and start averaging out the results.

This will enable you to make more accurate judgments of how long a task will take you in the future, so that you can plan for it accordingly.

Why not try beating your times. You can make yourself more efficient (and maybe more productive) if you try beating your times.

Even if you do not wish to hurry your tasks, trying to beat your times will give you an indication of how fast a task may be done for the occasions where you are pressed for time.

Time Your Tasks So That You Know How Long They Take

You need to physically use a stop clock of some sort, and you need to start physically noting down how long tasks take.

Ideally, if you have a lot of tasks you need to do regularly, you will be able to come up with a time estimate table for them.

You do this by timing your tasks on a regular basis. You then note down the results and create an average or a mean time for them.

You then put this into a chart. When you are creating your plan for the day or the week, you refer to the chart in order to see how long a task will take you.

It is not only a very efficient way of making a plan, it will also remind you of a few task you can do if you have a bit of spare time.

Set Time Budgets and Stick To Them

Sticking to them is the biggest problem for most people. Some people set time limits that are too strict.

Other people do not have enough respect for the “timer” system and will be nonchalant if they go over the time limit.

You need to make a conscious decision to take your time limits seriously.

If you do find that you run past your time limit, then you need to ask yourself if you did so because you were being unproductive, or you did so because the time limit was too strict.

Hopefully, after a long period of you making time budgets, and learning how to judge how long a task takes, you will automatically become good at time management.

You will know instinctively how long a task should take, and you will also become productive enough to stick to the time budget–thereby making yourself more efficient and productive.

Set a Timer That Tells You When Your Time Budget Is Up

This is vitally important. Some people think that they can just use a clock to time themselves, but there is a certain motivation factor that comes from hearing an alarm clock go off.

If it goes off before the task is done then it helps to identify where someone has been unproductive. If it goes off after a task has been completed, then it is actually a nice reward, and people may glean a little bit of satisfaction from it.

It is also very easy to be passively nonchalant when you time yourself on a clock (not an alarm clock) because there is little indication of at what point you failed.

You simply finish the task and look up at the clock to see you have gone over the time (which is not enough of a motivation to better yourself in the future).