Welcome to Time Management Training. Time is the one commodity in life that the managing director and the office junior share equally. No one has ever invented more time and so both of them only ever have 24 hours in a day to achieve everything they want to do. Time management training is therefore essential if you want to get the most out your team. Time management training is not only about increasing productivity however. Effective time management training empowers employees, who re-establish control of their working day. This reduces stress levels and, in our opinion, has a positive knock on effect via reduced absenteeism.
Save Yourself A Load Of Time With a Time Management Course
While time management can be learned via academic books, we believe this approach is flawed for two main reasons. Firstly, the vast majority of people learn better from role play and practical tasks. While it can be easy to read that email is a major time eater in the office, it is only through hands on training that employees can learn exactly how to deal with this issue. Secondly, academic books by their very nature are dull and boring, as a result the employee does not engage with the lesson and quickly forgets it. By creating a stimulating environment or training we ensure that employees enjoy what they are taught but retain the key learnings, making them more efficient in the workplace.
Ultimately, time management is about managing ourselves, courses therefore focus on making the best possible decisions for our time and cover areas such as:
- What type of person are you? Right brain and left brain people need to take different approaches
- How to get organised - case studies and practical sessions highlight the key areas where people are inefficient with time
- Setting your time goals, employees learn to set SMART objectives
- The art of effective delegation, you don't need to do it all
- Learning to say no, don't take the time monkey
- Manage your inbox, learn to control email
- Managing your workload
Top Time Management Tips for the Workplace
Studies have shown that employees spend almost 50% of their working day managing their inboxes. Effective email management can therefore free up nearly half a working day. Employees should therefore be discouraged from having their inboxes open throughout the day. As we all know, curiosity always gets the better of us when we hear the ping of a new message! Instead, try to limit the answering emails to 2 or 3 times in the course of the day. Auto responders can be set up which inform the sender of the time their email will be dealt with to help this process.
Practice one touch management. This is a golden oldie but is equally applicable to the modern working environment. Every time you pick up a piece of paper put a little dot in the top right hand corner of it. You will be amazed at how quickly some papers gather a number of dots. This highlights very easily what paperwork is either not being actioned or requires numerous actions, allowing you to better plan your time.
The To Do List. This is another golden oldie but again remains just as relevant today as always. At the end of every night set aside 5 minutes to write down what is required the next day. Try to mark each action as either high, medium or low to indicate the priority of the action. Those which are marked as high should be dealt with as soon as you reach the office the net day. This lets you action them while you are fresh and also delays the low priority work, which if it really is low priority may never need to be done!
Implement the Pareto Principle. This is known as the 80:20 rule to most of us! This principle highlights that 20% of what we do produces 80% of the results. It also works the other way, so 80% of what we do only produces 20% of our results. The key is therefore to identify what that magical 20% is, something that can only be identified by trial and effort and a sprinkling of smart thinking. The smart thinking comes from keeping a time log for a week or two. This will quickly highlight the areas which eat your time, allowing you to analyse whether they produce the magic 80% of the result you need.