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Practical Time Management

Organising Your Workspace

12 March 2010

Getting rid of clutter is one of the best things we can do to make a more efficient work environment.

Look at your desk. The object is to purge both the work surface and the contents of the desk. If the surface is already clear—great! However, if there are items on the desk, ask yourself if they are necessary and/or in an effective location. • Check position of the desk: Is it facing the door and making interruptions more likely? • Is the lighting adequate? • Is the phone where it can be reached easily? • Is there a better arrangement possible? • Is the seating/chair adequate?

Your first step should be to get rid of things that should NOT be on the desk. Check everywhere. Look under the blotter, on the walls surrounding the desk, in trays, etc. Collect all bits and pieces and de-clutter by throwing out or noting information in an appropriate spot and discarding it, or filing it for the moment.

Then move to the contents of the desk. Focus first on the tools you use, such as pens, pencils, and erasers.

Check to make sure of the following: • You have all tools you need, and they are in good working order. • Tools are organised so like tools are together and easily accessible. Useless tools should be discarded or moved to an area to be fixed. • Group like items together (for example, stationery, envelopes, and stamps all in one drawer). • Store any oversupply is in a supply area. • Tools are stored in a shallow desk drawer and are not on the desk.

Make four piles of all the papers they have strewn around, including those on the bulletin board, under your ink blotter or desk calendar, and on chairs. • Take home/get out of office • Help yourself/giveaways to colleagues • Cool stuff you want to keep and display • Things to be filed or written into your planner

Set up a system where vital information is saved where it can be readily found and then bits of paper can be discarded. Clutter often prevents us from using our time efficiently.

To review the Practical Management Workshop outline :Click here.

Procrastination

11 March 2010

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday. Don Marquis

The Story about Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got mad about it because it was Everybody’s job. Everyone thought that Anybody could do it, and Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody blamed Anybody.

STING Most people occasionally battle the habit of procrastination (putting off something you really want or need to do). And in spite of how good you are at setting goals, procrastination can sabotage your personal and professional life.

Here are five steps to take the STING out of feeling overwhelmed. S: Select one thing to do. T: Time yourself. Check the clock, give yourself an hour, and go for it. I: Ignore everything else while the clock is ticking. N: No breaks until your hour is up. G: Give yourself a reward when the hour is up.

To review the Practical Management Workshop outline :Click here.

How Rituals Can Help You

10 March 2010

Be dull in your everyday routine so you can be wildly creative where it counts. Routines simplify; clarify; and create order, symmetry, and familiarity in chaos and high stress. Rituals are the foundation of success.

During high stress, rituals are like landing pads in a storm. Top performers in every area of every industry have lives full of ritual. Most of us have rituals in the morning. Think about your morning routine and how, if you skip it, you have a tougher time launching your day.

Rituals allow you to concentrate on what’s really important. Once you set them, they save you time and energy because you won’t have to plan or think about them.

Before you develop your rituals, first simplify your life. Consider your entire lifestyle. If you have an expensive lifestyle that consumes huge amounts of effort just to maintain, perhaps that time could be better spent doing more enjoyable things than maintaining homes, boats, cars, etc. Similarly, too cheap a lifestyle has a similar result. If you spend hours negotiating the cheapest and the lowest rates, airfares, gas prices, etc., ask yourself if that is time truly well-spent.

Rituals include setting time with family, for eating, for sleeping, and for exercising. It means setting a clear routine or time for all routine activities. The way to get rituals to work for you is to make sure you are setting them at times that work best for you and your biological clock. Your morning routines should be so good that when you walk out of your house, you feel ready to tackle any problems the world throws at you.

Remember: • No activity is more important to ritualize than sleep. • By fixing mealtimes and planning in advance you’ll become vastly more efficient. • Since exercise has such a powerful effect on brain energy and alertness, place your workout at times of day you most need them.

To review the Practical Management Workshop outline :Click here.

Goals

09 March 2010

Setting Goals Before you can develop plans, you have to know what you want to accomplish (your goals or targets); how you want to accomplish those goals or targets; what resources of time, money, and materials you have; and who will carry out the implementation. So set some targets for yourself, targets that you can see… and we’ll start the journey to reaching them.

You know, most of us settle for much less than we can be. Don’t settle for that. It takes being willing to make changes, but we can change—we just have to want that change!

Many of us are full of ideas but short on taking constructive action to put those ideas into play. Maybe we try something once and then meet failure because we didn’t think and plan the actions through. But you know what they say about the lottery: “You can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket.”

Goals and objectives are the basis for planning. As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice, “If you don't know where you are going, then any road will take you there.” And that is often how we approach life. We just live, and if we end up where we want to be, hey, that's great. If we end up where we don't want to be, hey, that’s life.

We can do a bit better than that, if we really want to. The first element in planning is knowing what we want to achieve, and the way we word our goals is the biggest factor in helping us achieve them. Lucky for us, some smart person has come up with an acronym to help us remember these characteristics. Goals should be SMART.

S = SPECIFIC When we make our goals too general we aren’t able to visualize them, and if we can’t see them, we have a hard time devoting our efforts toward reaching them. We are more apt to do a good job of redecorating the bathroom if we have a picture in our mind of how it will look when it’s done.

M = MEASURABLE If we can’t measure a goal, we have no idea how close we are getting to reaching it, and that can be de-motivating. For example, let’s say you have decided you will save some money from every pay cheque in order to take a holiday this summer. But if you don’t set a specific amount each pay, and you don’t have an amount you want to reach, you are less apt to put the money away.

A = ATTAINABLE/ACHIEVABLE We sometimes think that we should set high targets or goals for ourselves in order to grow and stretch. Well, we do want to grow and stretch, but if we set goals that aren’t doable, we soon get discouraged and we stop trying. The really high achievers in the world know this. They set goals that they know they can reach, with a little stretching, and when they get there, they set another goal they know they can reach. They climb the mountain one foot at a time.

R = RELEVANT Goals have to make sense and have some importance, or they will soon be discarded. Set goals that make sense to you. (Another word that is often used for the R in this acronym is Realistic.)

T = TIMED Put a deadline on your goals. Deadlines are great for getting things done.

To review the Practical Management Workshop outline :Click here.

To Do Lists

08 March 2010

Time Management is 99% self-discipline. Make a decision, do you want to improve or not? It’s a simple decision.

Time Management – it is often said “I don’t have enough time….. I have this and that and the next thing to do and I just can’t fit it all in…” Fact 1, you have the same number of hours and minutes in the day as everyone else. Fact 2, if we stopped digressing and started doing we would get more done. Fact 3, if we compiled a daily ‘to-do’ list we would save time by not having to try to remember what we have forgotten!

To Do Lists 1. Use a ‘To Do’ system. 2. Have a daily ‘To Do’ list – schedule and prioritise your tasks. 3. Review the daily list each day (first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening) and plan your priorities. 4. Keep your daily ‘To Do’ list always in sight. 5. As you clear each item, delete it in brilliant red – just looking at a list of completed tasks makes you feel even better! 6. Don’t include too many items – remember the jobs which always crop up unexpectedly. 7. Maintain a second ‘To Do’ list for longer term tasks or those to which a date cannot yet be given. 8. Transfer items from the second list to the daily list whenever relevant. 9. Use Categories, Telephone, Visit, Tasks etc 10. Use the ‘To Do’ lists – don’t ignore them: they are possibly your most powerful time management tools. 11. Write it down – don’t try to keep your ‘To Do’ Lists in your head – keep that free to actually do them. 12. Leave some time for the unexpected. 13. Have the things you need constantly in one place. 14. Identify and concentrate on the high-yield tasks, if you have the choice.

To review the Practical Management Workshop outline :Click here.

To review the section on Microsoft Excel :Click here.