time management techniques

Setting Realistic Goals
If you are going to make a consistent and sustained effort to manage your time more effectively, you need to see that your own efforts are rewarded. Before trying to change your behaviour, you need to set realistic goals that, when achieved, make you feel that the effort has been worthwhile. Having clear objectives is vitally important, this could be stated as: "I will manage this aspect of my time to achieve that result."

You will need:
A clear understanding of the tactics you intend to use.
The determination to apply them consistently.
A clear measure of the effectiveness of each tactic.

It is not enough to achieve some results from your time management effort. You must be able to recognize in detail what these results are and to obtain some tangible reward for the effort involved. If you don't, you are unlikely to be able to keep up your good intentions for any length of time. For most people the most effective approach to time management is to begin with a limited range of time management tactics, to apply these and to gain positive results, before extending this into an overall strategy.

The 80-20 Rule
The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that within any system the tendency is for some elements to yield much higher returns than others. Usually, around 20% of the elements will be high yielders and the remaining 80% will be low yielders. What is even more interesting is that the 20% of high yielders tend to produce around 80% of the yield and the 80% of low yielders produce the remaining 20%. Whilst Pareto’s research was concerned with economics and found, for example, that 20% of an organizations customers are responsible for 80% of its profits, the 80/20 principle has been found to apply to a wide variety of areas. In terms of time management and productivity it implies that 20% of the time that you spend on something will produce 80% of your final output, while the remaining 80% of your time will only produce 20% of it. Obviously, there is nothing fixed about this 80/20 ratio, it is only a guide to what tends to happen if we don't take any action to work more effectively.

Perfectionism Can be Too Expensive
Perfectionism is a common aspiration in the lives of many professional people, but its cost can be prohibitively high. The search for perfection can result in more time being spent in analysis, criticism and editing than was ever spent in producing the work originally. Perfectionism may lead people to resist taking on tasks that in reality are quite straightforward. Their own inability to address a task, without continually reassessing it against a perfect ideal may make even simple activities too daunting to take on. Once you are aware of the Pareto principle you can use it as a guide to help you become more realistic about how much time is needed for a particular task. If you are guilty of extreme perfectionism or procrastination then you may find that less than 20% of your time produces 80% of the final output. Ask yourself: "Is the extra hour you were going to spend editing your report likely to result in only one or two marginal improvements, and couldn't this time be spent more productively on something else?"

The Objective Measurement of Time
It is very common for people to attribute certain kinds of results to themselves, usually their successes, and certain kinds of results to other people, usually their failures. This often leads people to be unclear about the relationship between cause and effect, which is particularly important when it comes to time management. For example, whilst there are occasions when other people are responsible for our time loss, we may find it difficult to admit that we could have done more to minimize the effect. This can manifest itself in the language we use to analyze time loss and the consequent avoidance of our own responsibility. For example:

"Where has the time gone?” can be rephrased as "How did I use the time?"
"It was such a waste of time ..." can be rephrased as "I wasted so much time"
"The time flew past ..." can be rephrased as "I failed to keep a track of the time"
"He took up too much of my time ..." can be rephrased as "I let him take up too much of my time"
You should always make a conscious effort when analyzing lost time and begin to take appropriate responsibility for it.

If you want to learn to manage your time better, the first step is to document how you are currently spending it. Surprisingly, most of us do not have an accurate picture of how we spend our time. We may think that we know how long we spend on each task, but these impressions usually turn out to be inaccurate when compared to a detailed time log. It is useful to carry out an objective review of how you currently spend your time by keeping a log or journal which details which tasks you did, when and for how long. This time log shouldn't take more than 10 minutes a day to complete and you will probably need a further 20 minutes or so at the end of the week to analyze the results. How long you need to keep the log for will depend on the nature of your work. If you work on a monthly cycle, then keep the log for a couple of months. If you work on a weekly cycle, then two or three weeks should provide an accurate picture.

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