Time management tips for career success

Image by Brooks Elliott via Flickr

Time is an elusive commodity. Making effective use of your time can have a profound effect on your career and on your life in general, but unless you manage it carefully time can slip away almost without you noticing.

Consequently, time management is one of the biggest challenges in today’s workplace. Taking control of your time really could be the catalyst that will help you to achieve what you want in life, and you’ll find countless books, courses, systems and strategies out there to help you. Meanwhile, try these simple suggestions to start you on the road to increased personal productivity and success.

• Plan your work: spending ten to fifteen minutes at the start or end of each day planning your work will help you to focus on what’s important.
  Deal with routine more effectively: examine the routine tasks you do every day with a critical eye. Can they be streamlined at all? Could some be minimised, or even eliminated altogether? You’ll be amazed how much cumulative time you can save by shaving a few precious minutes off your routine tasks.
• Don’t waste time waiting: we all spend time waiting – waiting for appointments, waiting for the train or bus, waiting in traffic. Use that time constructively to catch up with some reading, or to work out how to move things forward on an important project.

• Set clear goals: if you don’t know what you want, how can you work towards achieving it? This is as true in life as it is in your career. Make sure you know what you want, then set about making it happen.
• Focus on results: being busy isn’t the same thing as being effective. Try to arrange your work into tasks that deliver tangible results.
• Differentiate between “urgent” and “important”: beware of taking on too many small “urgent” projects. If you spend all your time fire-fighting you won’t have time to focus on more important tasks that move you towards your long term goals.
• Get outside your comfort zone: we tend to naturally put off the tasks we’re least comfortable with. However, these are often the most important tasks in terms of achieving the results we want. Tackling these tasks first normally represents a much better investment of your time than focusing on the comfortable and familiar.
• Do small tasks immediately: don’t clutter up your life with long lists of mini-tasks. Cultivate a habit of doing anything that only takes a minute or two immediately. Do it now, do it once, and get it out of the way.
• Assign set times for e-mail and voice mail: give yourself set times during the day for checking and replying to e-mail and voice mail messages. Monitoring your messages on a continuous basis can eat into an extraordinary amount of your day.
• Take regular breaks: it may seem like odd advice when we’re talking about getting more done, but when you feel yourself flagging taking a short break will rejuvenate your energy levels, improve your focus and increase your productivity.

Mastering your time management will take a bit of effort, and of course will itself make demands on your time – but if you decide to make that investment the payback could be immense.

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