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Effective Utilization of Time

Overview

What you accomplish during a 24-hour period depends on your own motivation, your energy, your skills and abilities, and other resources.

Since there are always demands on your time, it may be helpful to think about what you will do with your time and to consider some strategies for more effective time management.

Time management is not a way to make you work harder and longer, but means to help you work smarter to accomplish your work more easily and rapidly.

Benefits of Effective Utilization of Time

If you can manage your time more effectively, you will be rewarded in a variety of ways:

Efficient - You will be more efficient in serving your organization and will be able to support your teams better.
Successful - You will achieve greater success in your role.
Healthy - On a personal level, you will certainly feel healthier, more energetic, and in a generally better mood.

Obstacles to Effective Utilization of Time

There are a lot of things that make it difficult for us to manage our time effectively. Let’s consider some of the most common ones, and see if they apply to us:

Unclear Objectives – It’s hard to hit a target with your eyes closed, and it’s just as hard to accomplish something when you aren’t exactly clear about what you want to achieve.
Disorganization – It’s easy to see when your desk is too messy, but sometimes you have to step back and ask yourself if you are taking an organized approach in completing all of your tasks.
Inability to say “NO” – We all want to be as helpful as we can when others need us, but this can mean taking time away from other priorities to do something we may not have planned.
Interruptions – Many times we are in the middle of accomplishing something really important and the telephone rings. These calls can not only take you away from your task, but sometimes they interrupt your train of thought and you can’t return to where you were without retracing your steps.
More Interruptions – We all like to talk to others but conversations at inappropriate times can cost us time when we have to stop what we are doing and redirect ourselves from our plans.
Periods of inactivity – As much as we think we are busy, there are times in our day when we are not really doing anything. Recognizing and making use of these times can have a positive effect on our efforts.
Too many things at once – Many of our tasks are not routines. They require concentration to detail. When we are attempting to do too many different things at one time, each individual task suffers as a result.
Stress and fatigue – Everyone experiences stress from time to time, and sometimes we actually operate a little better when there is some level of stress. Too much stress, on the other hand, causes our work to suffer and wears us down physically and mentally. Dealing with stress is an important part of time management.
All work and no play – Most successful people know how to balance work and play. When work takes over your life, you not only give your body little time to re-energize, but you may end up sacrificing the really important things in life like family and friends.

What We Should Do!

Recognize that obstacles exist - The obstacles that we face are not insurmountable. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to identify that these obstacles exist and are affecting your ability to manage your time.
Identify them - When you have identified your obstacles, you can begin to overcome them.
Employ strategies to overcome - Come up with some strategies you can use to overcome the obstacles.

Set Goals for Utilization of Time

The first and most important strategy you can employ to manage your time is to set clear goals for yourself. You will want to accomplish many things in your time of office. The best favor you can do for yourself is to determine what those goals are and make sure your efforts are always directed toward their achievement.

Effective goals share a number of characteristics in common. Effective goals are:

Specific – When a goal is too vague, you may never know how to reach it or even when you have reached it. Make sure that you know exactly what you hope to achieve.

Measurable – When you have a goal that is measurable, you will know how far you have to go to reach the goal, and when you get there.

Achievable – It is commendable to set your sights high, but sometimes we try to accomplish more than we can actually do. Training and certifying ten or more leaders may or may not be achievable at this time for a number of reasons. Your goals should be such that, if you “extend yourself” you can just reach them.

Realistic – Can you establish a program to help everyone with adherence problems? It is certainly a worthwhile goal, but it may not be realistic at this time.

Time-bound – Most of the goals that you establish in your position will not be long-term. It is important to set time guidelines for your goals so that you can keep track of your progress as you are going along and can be alert to when you are falling behind schedule.

Prioritize & Organize

You will be faced with many tasks. It is safe to say that you will not be able to do everything, so it is wise to periodically make a list of the tasks that confront you and prioritize them. The following technique may be helpful in prioritizing:

Do – Determine from the list the things you think are most important to accomplish and are things you should do yourself.

Delegate – Remember that there many leaders within your region with skills, experience, and motivation to carry out a wide variety of tasks. A truly effective worker understands that achievers do not try to accomplish everything themselves and recognizes that some things are better handled by others. Delegating not only frees up your time for other things, it ensures that resources are used wisely and that people who want to help are motivated and involved.

Delay until another time – Some things can wait. The danger is delaying too many things until deadlines are near. The best policy here is to consider when things are due, how long it will take to accomplish them, and what your current workload will allow.

Delete – If you have set goals using the guidelines we mentioned earlier, you may recognize that some of them are not achievable or realistic, or that they are just not important. A good leader knows when to concentrate on the important and eliminate the rest.

As you prioritize tasks and set deadlines, you will want to organize your plans and actions. You will find phones to be an indispensable tool for managing your time.

Learn when to say “NO”

Now let's address some more strategies that you can apply to your life. These also have a great impact on how effectively you manage your time.

The first of these strategies is being able to say “NO” when it is appropriate. Your life in office has always been about giving all that you can to serve your organization. That doesn’t change, but as your duties expand as an achiever you will find you are called on to do much more than you have ever been asked to do before.

When you learn to say “NO” you are not closing the door on your responsibilities, but rather you are making sure that you can meet your commitments and accomplish the maximum possible in the time available to you.

To be able to say “NO” you will have to accept these three principles:

I realize that I can’t do everything
I won’t agree to undertake a task or project that I know I will not be able to complete in the timeframe required
I will not make commitments that are not consistent with the goals and objectives I have set for myself

If you keep these principles in mind, you will find it easier to justify (and explain) why some requests must be turned down. You will also find that you are better able to accomplish the things that you have prioritized as “must do.”

Concentrate on the Task at Hand

One important strategy to keep in mind is to concentrate completely on the current task. Concentration can be difficult when you have a lot on your mind. Your time will be better spent if you are able to:

Focus on your goal – You may have many commitments and many concerns, but you will accomplish more when you keep focused on the one task you are performing at the moment.
Tune out interruptions – You will find your concentration is at its highest level when you can set aside a time during the day when you will not answer the phone or schedule visitors. Avoiding interruptions for specific periods of time, you may find you can accomplish tasks successfully in far less time than you anticipated. When you must respond to phone calls, be assertive in minimizing interruptions by asking if you can call back at another time or meet another day.

Consider your Personal Prime Time

Are you one of those people who gets up before the sun rises and starts working? Is the early evening, after the evening meal, your time to work? Or are you someone who prefers to wait until the quiet of the late-night hours to do the really hard tasks?

Everyone is different. Most research shows that tasks that take the most mental concentration are most effectively accomplished early in the day, but even these studies acknowledge that this is not always true, and that everyone has a “Personal Prime Time.”

When you plan your tasks, think about your own “Prime Time.” If you do your best work early, plan to do the routine tasks later in the day and concentrate on the more challenging tasks when you are at your best. If you don’t really get going until later, handle the routines in the morning and save the more difficult tasks for later.

Outcome

Always remember “The Big Rocks of Life”! For the way you prioritize, will prove to be critical for your success and well-being.

You put the rocks in the wrong sequence in the jar, and then when you pour water in it, the water is bound to overflow. But, if you were to put the rocks in the right sequence, then there would be no spillage.

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