How to Plan and Prioritise Your Time
How to Plan and Prioritise Your Time
Time management and organization are like evergreen trees- they never lose their importance and are frequently discussed topics in business. Everyone tends to understand that the key ingredient to living a life that is less stressful, more enjoyable and one that allows you to find the time to fit everything into a jam-packed schedule is proper planning and prioritising of your time.
What most people don’t seem to know is how to make that happen!
How can you prioritize your work and tasks so that you have enough time for it all, and still keep your sanity?
Get a Calendar/Planner/Diary
Regardless of what you call it, you need to have some sort of calendar that you use to plan out your time. Preferably one that you can carry around with you, and physically write in- but some people might find the digital versions to be just as effective.
The night before each day, take 15 minutes to plan the following day.
Using To-Do Lists Effectively
Making a list of 50 things that need to be done is not the best use of your time; nor will it actually help you manage your time better.
When creating your list of things to do, you need to consider how long the task should take you, and physically block that amount of time on your calendar. For example, if you need to check email, write a report, and attend a sales meeting tomorrow, your to-do list might look like this:
8:30am – 9am: Read and Respond to Email
9am-11am: Write report
11am-11:15am: Coffee break
11:15-12:30pm: Sales Meeting
It won’t do you any good if you make a list with five times the tasks that you can actually accomplish within a specific time period, so be realistic when planning your schedule.
Prioritise Tasks
Most business owners and/or managers are overwhelmed with a large number of activities that need to be done on a regular basis. The best way to effectively plan your time and keep things under control is to prioritise the tasks according to their level of importance.
When working through the creation of your to-do list; you would want to schedule your urgent, or most important tasks for earlier in the day, to make sure they get completed. As the day goes on, unexpected interuptions may cause some of your tasks to go undone; so it’s always a good idea to do the most pressing activities before doing those that are not quite as important.
Delegate, Do, or Schedule
You’ve no doubt heard the saying “Don’t put off til tomorrow what can be done today”. While this is true for avoiding procrastination, there is nothing wrong with scheduling less-urgent tasks for a later day or time- as long as you are actually scheduling them to be done and not just avoiding them!
When things come up during the day that you can do in under two minutes, just do them right away. This could be answering an email, filing information, or putting a client’s folder in the file cabinet (versus setting it on the desk to do later!)
If there are tasks that you are faced with completing that someone else on your team could do just as well- quickly delegate those items to the proper people with a scheduled deadline for completion. This only works effectively if you don’t have to spend as much time explaining the project as you would just completing it yourself, so make sure the activity is really something that can be delegated before passing it off.
The keys to successful delegation are that the person is capable of completing the work; they know when it’s due and will keep to that deadline; and it is a task that delegation results in giving you time to work on a more urgent matter.
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