Work Time Management:
From Blocks To Rocks
Four suggestions to help improve your work time management.Blocks of Time: A True Story
For the most part, they were lessons in living my life. This meant doing the things I wanted to do, by completing the things I had to do..as effectively and efficiently as possible.
To keep things simple, I organized my time by blocks, using only three categories:
morning, afternoon and evening.
In those happy days, I had only two priorities: school work and social activities.
These two priorities switched back and forth, depending upon what was happening in the 'academic calendar'.
I have no idea how many blocks of time there were in a typical week.
Top
But my time management system worked: it helped me successfully complete two university degrees and one professional certification course.
When I started my first full time job, I enjoyed the luxury of virtually unlimited challenging opportunities, with minimal time constraints.
I enjoyed my work so much that before long, I was willingly working most mornings, afternoons and evenings. Looking back, 100-hour weeks were the norm...not the exception.
On my first performance review, my supervisor, for whom I had enormous respect, suggested that I needed to improve my work time management.
When I asked him what he meant by that comment, he told me that I should work fewer hours and learn to work more effectively and efficiently.
Instead of simple telling me how to do this, he simply said “You are a smart guy. You will figure it out”.
Top
Long story short...I revised the time block approach that I had used in school.
But this time I limited my working time to 12 blocks per week.
This meant that I set aside a combined total of 12 mornings, afternoons and evenings for work.
This approach worked so well that I still use it to this day. But now I limit myself to 10 time blocks.
Based on my experience with work time management, here are four suggestions that will help you improve your own work time management.
Top
1. Set Goals
Your
goals are the
factors that determine how you will allocate your time blocks.
If you have not set your goals or reviewed them recently, do it now. Set goals that represent results that you would like to achieve...and set smart goals.
If you need help with your goal setting, check out How To Achieve Better Marketing Results...Sooner.
Even though this ebook has a marketing focus, the simple goal-setting process will also help you set goals that are right for you.
Top
2. Set & Allocate Your Time
It really doesn't matter whether you want to work fewer hours or become more effective and efficient at your work...or both.From the perspective of work time management, the solution is the same: set & allocate your time.
From my experience, this means setting the number of time blocks you are prepared to work each week.
Once you have set your time blocks, allocate your activities, based on the priority of goals that you set in item 1 above.
Another way of looking at this step is to think of setting or limiting your time as the size of the jar into which you will place your rocks and other stuff, as outlined in this time management lesson.
Top
3. Place The Big Rocks First
As
outlined in the time management lesson, Steven Covey
introduces the idea of putting
the big rocks...your goals... into the jar first.
If a rock is too big to fit into the jar, maybe it can be broken into smaller rocks which will fit.
For purposes of work time management, maybe overwhelming tasks can be broken into smaller sub-tasks that are less daunting...and will fit into your time frame.
Top
4. Continue to Improve
The more you practice the principles of effective work time management, the better you will become at managing your time.Once you are comfortable with your time management practices, you can start applying the continuous improvement strategies to ensure that you are managing your time as effectively and efficiently as possible.
It really doesn't matter whether you think of time in blocks or goals as rocks.
What does matter is that you do think about your work time and how you can best manage it to achieve the results you seek.
Top
|
|
