First Level Leadership

Are Your Time Management Techniques Being Tested Lately?

Ready to improve your time management techniques?

Can you judge the time that is passing?

Do you work harder managing people than you used to…? Are you too busy in the activity trap of managing your staff? Managing people does take time. 

A manager who doesn’t have a practical knowledge of time management is seldom able to plan, supervise and evaluate someone else’s work. 

I am going to offer you some time management techniques, which will help you to manage your staff more efficiently and effectively. 

Here are some time management techniques that can help you: 

How do you respond when you see one of your workers standing as idle as a painted ship?

I mean he is doing nothing. Does it bother you? Do you have the temptation to give him something just to occupy him?

Slow down. If you try to fill your employees’ time for them, you will be wasting both their and your time. Instead, make them think what needs to be done. Then show them the way.

Make every effort to give them the required tools. Then, please get aside and out of their way. Don’t breathe down their neck, trying to ensure that they are working hard enough. 

This is a fairly useful time management technique, which pays dividends in the long run. 

If you see one of your staff standing next to a printer to expedite the movement of the paper from the machine, what does it tell you?

Either the machine is not working or the staff has nothing more meaningful to do.Have your hired him to wait for the print out to arrive?

Faithful servants like fax, printers, scanners, etc make our lives easy, but at the same make atrocious masters.

I am not even remotely suggesting you should be working without these objects of wonder. However, make sure that the machines are working for you, rather than you working for the machines.

Make sure the time saving equipments you have in your office are actually saving everyone’s time. These time savers could be anything – a computer, a piece of software, internet connection, answering machines… and the list goes on. Please do take a fresh stock of your time savers. This is one of the useful time management techniques, which is often neglected. 

Do you engage in the long term planning and the essential skill enhancement training for your staff? Or do these things get lost in the daily hue and cry?

Learn to distinguish between important and urgent. Important activities contribute towards the long-term goals and development, e.g., planning. Urgent activities demand immediate attention but may not be always important unless they take the shape of emergencies. Remember - lack of planning usually leads to more emergencies.

You will never find time to do these vital (but rarely urgent) activities with your staff. As a discerning manager, make every attempt to relieve your staff for work that is more important, rather than just urgent but unimportant tasks like phone calls, memos, faxes, unnecessary meetings etc. 

Power of why  - your staff is justified to know the purpose of their work. Therefore, when you ask them to do something, give them a fair reason and you will have a more motivated and efficient work force. 

Encourage them to do one thing at a time and to do it well!Watch your staff – are they on the phone, taking notes, focusing on the computer screen, and trying to gobble a sandwich all at the same time. Unfortunately, they will neither enjoy their sandwich nor get anything worthwhile done. Encourage them to do one thing well at a time and they will accomplish more in the end. It is known as the slow fast approach because they will work faster and better with less need for elucidation.

Cut down the meeting time!

Do not schedule a meeting if you don’t have a good reason to meet. Meetings can rob you of valuable time. So what are you going to do with all this time you have saved for your staff? I am sure you will not have any difficulty filling their time. 

However, you if don’t plan well, existing jobs will simply inflate to take up the available time.

Some thing to think about?

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