Posts Tagged ‘managing time’
7 Simple Tips To Improve Your Work / Life Balance
The more senior you become in the organisation, the tougher it can be to maintain some form of work / life balance.
So what simple tips do I suggest for improving work / life balance?
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Tip 1: Set deadlines
- Have you ever noticed that when you set a deadline for getting something done or a timescale to do something, you somehow do it? Setting a deadline is a bit like setting an intention which sends a signal to your mind.
- Whether you believe it or not, some things are more important than others. Make the point of identifying and prioritising how you will use your time.
- Being able to find things when you need them, whether in a computer or filing cabinet, can pay big dividends.
- If you don’t, you will just end up staying that extra half hour, which will in reality end up being two hours.
- Don’t suffer in silence. Ask for help if you are struggling.
- Rather than stuff that keeps you busy.
- Tough as it might be, you need to be able to switch off.
Tip 2: Prioritise well
Tip 3: Be well organised
Tip 4: Plan things out of work
Tip 5: Ask for help
Tip 6: Focus on what matters
Tip 7: Learn to switch off
The truth is, maintaining a healthy work / life balance can actually enhance your performance. So what’s your first step?
Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here
Five Ways To Make Better Use Of Your Time
Time is the ultimate limiting factor. It does not matter who you are, you have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week.
So how can you make better use of your time?
- Start to view it in the same way as money and invest it wisely.
- Plan how you are going to utilise your team each day.
- Do what you do best and delegate everything else.
- Get clear on your priorities and then focus on them.
- Track how you are spending your time to spot the time stealers.
So what other tips would you offer to make better use of time?
Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here
8 Quick Time Management Tips
Having sufficient time is often cited as a key challenge for managers and leaders. So what are 8 quick tips you can work on straight away.
Tip 1: Get clear on your goals
Tip 2: Think clearly, calmly and positively
Tip 3: Stop moaning about the circumstances and start taking action
Tip 4: Say no when you really cannot take on anything else
Tip 5: Take breaks and try to get some exercise
Tip 6: When you are working, focus on working
Tip 7: Tidy your desk so that you can find things quickly
Tip 8: Tackle the time bandits who steal your time
So what other tips would you add?
Leadership: How Are You Spending Your Time?
When it comes to money, the vast majority of leaders and managers will be able to give an excellent account of where they spent the budget they were allocated and what they delivered with that budget. On the other hand if you asked them how they were using their biggest limiting factor, time, how many would be able to give a clear answer?
In truth, very few of us ever take the time to accurately capture where we spend our time and what results we deliver from the time we have invested. So why should you bother anyway?
1. You might discover that your time utilisation is a bit like a leaking water pipe. A lot is being lost but you are not quite sure why.
2. You might be struggling to achieve deadlines or rushing at the last minute to deliver because you are not investing your time wisely.
3. You might be having to continually work extra hours (usually unpaid) to get everything done.
Not taking care of how you spend your time is a bit like not bothering to take care of company money or company equipment.
Doing a time analysis is really easy to do and has a ton of benefits, for example:
1. You start to discover if you are spending your time on what is really important to your success as a leader.
2. You start to become much more conscious of the cost of doing certain things.
3. You find ways of adding more value to the organisation without having to make more and more personal sacrifice.
Bottom Line – Time is probably the biggest limiting factor for just about everyone. So what action could you take starting today to tackle the biggest limiting factor to you delivering results and achieving success
Leadership Success: What’s Your Prime Time?
If you are a leader, your the ultimate measure of your success is what you deliver. Yes there are other factors that contribute to how you are rated as a leader but at the end of the day it is results that count. If you are in any doubt about this, just pick up the business section of any good quality newspaper or sector publication and chances are you will come across:
1. Some leader who is under pressure to deliver a certain result.
2. Some leader who has been removed because the results delivered were not good enough.
With all of this focus on results, it is important that as a leader you use your biggest limiting factor wisely. So what is the biggest limiting factor? In my experience it is time. There are always many options open to you on how you could use the time available but the amount you are allocated in a day, week, month or year is fixed. Contrast with a constraint like the amount of budget you have available. You can make a case for more financial resource and if your case is compelling enough, you have a good chance of securing additional resource.
So if time is a major constraint, you need to know when your own personal prime time is. It will be different for different people. Some people are at their best first thing in the morning, while for others burning the midnight oil is best. When you know your personal prime time you:
1. Can schedule the most important tasks for the times when your performance is optimal.
2. Avoid wasting optimal performance time on anytime tasks. You know things like e-mails, routine phone calls or texts.
3. Deliver better results, because you focus your attention on the things that have greatest impact on the results you deliver.
Bottom Line – Your personal productivity greatly influences your results. So what steps are you going to take to do the most important things in your personal prime performance time?
Personal Effectiveness: Know Your Priorities
Ask any manager what one of their biggest challenges is and chances are that a lack of time will be pretty high up the list of answers. Given that the total time available per day, week, month or year is out of your control, it is how you use it that matters.
With lengthy job descriptions and vague objectives being the norm, you need to take control and get clarity on your priorities.
It is pretty easy to do this.
1. List out your understanding of your priorities
2. Arrange to meet with your boss
3. Ask him or her to tell you what they see as priority
4. Come to an agreed list of priorities
5. Plan your time to focus on these priorities
Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps professionals, teams and organisations develop their management and leadership capability.
Management: How to Get Things Done
If you are a manager or leader right now, chances are that you have to deliver more with fewer resources. Despite this you are still expected to provide all of the key things necessary to run the business. You know, pay staff, pay suppliers, do appraisals to name just a few. So how can you get smarter with how you use your time and get things done?
1. Time Audit
Where are you spending your time? Ask most managers and leaders this and you will get a vague answer. The key to being smarter with how you use your time is a time audit. Make sure this covers a typical work cycle so that you can get real insights where your time is going.
2. Know Your Priorities
What are your 3-5 key priorities? Armed with this information and your time audit, you can quickly determine whether your time is being spent on what matters- your key priorities. After all you want to spending time on things that are important to the organisation and your success.
3. Cut out the unproductive stuff
If you are doing something that is not necessary for you to do, stop doing it. Delegate it, outsource it and even question if it is necessary.
4. Make a list of your time wasters
We all have things that fall into the time waster category. What’s on your list?
• Meetings that are just talking shops and never result in any productive outcomes.
• Checking every e-mail as soon as it arrives.
Make a list of your time wasters and commit to doing something about them.
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Time Management Challenges
I have recently being doing a survey on peoples biggest challenges. One of the most common challenges seems to be time management. So if you are challenged when it comes to your time, what can you do about it?
- Plan how you are going to use it
- Set time limits for individual tasks
- Look at your time stealers and tackle them
- Don’t set yourself up for failure by being overly optimistic about what you can achieve
- Keep a track of where your time is going
What else would you add to the list?
Improving your time management
I wonder how often we all say or hear others say that there is not enough time. Trouble is we cannot add to the number of hours available in a day, week or month. As a result it is how we use and manage the time that we have have available that matters. For me there are three key questions to answer in improving your time management.
- What are my priorities?
- Where am I spending my time?
- What are my time stealers?
If you have enjoyed this post you might like to check out the free audio masterclass profiting from prioritising
What are your time stealers?
A lot of people talk about not having enough time. However, the amount of time we have available is not going to increase. There are only 24 hours in day or 168 hours in a week. It is how we use that time that matters. We all have things that I call time stealers. These time stealers take our attention away from the things that matter to getting results. They include things like:
- Text messaging
- Surfing the internet
- Chatting on the phone during work time
What are your biggest time stealers and what have you found to be most effective in addressing them?
