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12 Tips To Increase Productivity With Better Time Management

Written by: Susan Regier

Article Overview: With a little effort we can all find ways to use the time we have more productively. Here are a dozen tried and tested tips for working quicker, smarter, and more effectively:

12 Tips To Increase Productivity With Better Time Management

With a little effort we can all find ways to use the time we have more productively. Here are a dozen tried and tested tips for working quicker, smarter, and more effectively:

1. Allocate 20% of your day – between 1 and a half to 2 hours – to working on your most important objectives. If you don’t do this, you will find that all your time is spent reacting to things, and the really important tasks somehow never get finished when they should.

2. Tackle the hardest things first. All of us like to do what’s easy. But you must get into the hard stuff – and the best time to get stuck into it is first up, when you can give it all you’ve got. At least make inroads, even if you can’t finish everything you want to in a day.

3. Have a maximum of 3 major things on the go at a time. Any more than this is asking to get bogged down. Set your priorities according to what will best help you to grow your business – and tackle them in that order of priority.

4. At the beginning of each week, make a list of your goals and targets and prioritise them. Revise the list daily, as necessary. Refer to it regularly and make sure you’re on track. A whiteboard is a very visible and convenient tool for keeping this ‘main goals’ list going.

5. Use a task planning sheet to sort your daily priorities out and help you reach those weekly goals.

6. Group similar activities together – make all your outgoing phone calls at one part of the day; send all your emails at the one time; deal with all incoming mail, email and messages in bunches, and so on. You might want to break the day up so that - for example - you spend a maximum of 15 or 20 minutes on incoming email or voicemail in the morning, and another block just before lunch. Turn off the “new mail” alert on your email, and check it only twice a day.

7. Add at least 20% to any initial estimate of work to be undertaken. Things rarely go according to plan – and if they do, you’ll be in front, not behind. Be realistic about the amount of work you and your colleagues or associates can do by a given deadline.

8. As much as possible, deal with any item of mail (and email) once only. Action it, bin it, or – but only if absolutely necessary - file it for future reference in a clearly labelled file. If you’re working under pressure, prioritise the incoming mail that needs to be actioned, and deal with less important matters later in the day.

9. To minimise errors, work on one thing at a time. Use a filing drawer or folder rack to reduce the amount of workspace occupied by other papers on your desk, so that you don’t get sidetracked by things you haven’t planned for or prioritised.

10. Don’t waste time perfecting things that don’t have to be perfect. ‘Excellence’ means doing the best that you can in the time available. We can all excel without being perfect. After you finish something, check it through once then move on to the next task.

11. Plan some time each and every week to be invested in marketing your business. You must reach out to customers old and new; and you must invite them to do business with you. This is working on the business, and it is at least as important as anything you do while working in the business.

12. If you do all the above things but still can’t work out where your time is going, you may need to chart your time use to see how you really spend it.

This is quite easy and takes just a few minutes a day for one or two weeks. List your principal activities down the left column of a table, and your work days across the top row. Jot in the approximate amount of time you’ve spent on each activity, each time you stop doing it.

Tally the times up at the end of the week, and see whether the proportions of time you actually spent meets your desired targets.

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