What is Time management?
Time management is simply how we decide to utilize our time in order to maximize our productivity in achieving a certain goal. It is the process of organizing and planning how to divide your time between specific activities.
Some people feel as if they have more to do and less time to do almost every time they are faced with a task, juggling all their responsibilities can make it feel as though they’re just not enough time in the day to accomplish everything. Building an essential time management skill would enables you to work smarter and not harder, so that you get more done in less time, even when time is tight and pressures are high. Failing to manage your time might damage your effectiveness and cause you stress.
How Then Can You Build An Essential Time Management Skill?
Set Goal(s): Time management is not a stand-alone skill, you cannot manage time, you can only spend time, and that is, you can only manage how you use your time. How you use your time should be driven by your set goals. The most important aspect of building an essential time management skill is the ability to use your time in a manner that serves your goals. When making decisions about what to focus your time on, you should always be cognizant of your goals and how each action is aimed at bringing you closer to achieving those goals.
Work Prioritization: Prioritizing should not begin with a focus on getting more work done rather it should always begin with avoiding/eliminating the tasks which you should not be pulling off. Once this has been done, you can switch your focus to completing the most valuable work you can with the time and resources available to you. Some people struggle with prioritization in their work because they attempt to prioritize the items that are on their task list not knowing that some items should never have made it to the task list in the first place. When you get it right, you will find that your time management improves rapidly. For effective work prioritization, divide your work/task into:
Very Important – Do First
Important – Do Next
Less Important – Do Later
Not Important – Don’t Do
Motivate Yourself: There are days when you do not feel like doing anything, maybe because you feel sick, tired, bored, or simply lacking motivation. On days like this, there is little that anyone else can do to get you going. You need to be able to motivate yourself to take action, even though you do not feel like it. The truth is most times there will be nobody standing over you to hold you accountable on a daily basis. You will be totally responsible for your own results. Lacking the ability to motivate yourself, might result in you experiencing large amounts of pressure and stress.
Focus: Regardless of what you are trying to do, there will always be something else competing for your attention. It’s not easy to shut everything out and focus on the task at hand but it is important to remember that no matter how many tasks need to be done, you can only work on one task at any given moment. The myth of multi-tasking causes many problems for those who wish to improve their time management but if you want to get results, you must learn to focus on one task at a time and block out all distractions.
Decision Making: It’s actually nice to think that you could just sit down and do your work without having to put any serious thought into it. But you will always find yourself in a position where you will have to make important decisions like:
Which task is to be done?
Which tasks do not get done?
When a task is completed
Which meetings to attend
Who you can or cannot help and many more.
If your decisions only affect you, it wouldn’t be a problem but every task has a knock-on effect on another person, which means that every decision that you make has consequences both for you and for others. If you are not good at making decisions, you will notice the negative impacts in every area of your life. It is imperative that you are able to consider the consequences and make effective, clear decisions.
Planning: Tasks sometimes will overlap and be dependent on each other; there will often be times when one task cannot be started until another task is finished. Your schedule will also be impacted by the schedules of others. These factors need to be considered at the beginning of each task and, monitored throughout. Failure to do so can lead to delays and missed deadlines. Planning allows you to foresee all of the tasks which will be required to complete a project and, how they will best fit together. A well-made plan will save you a great deal of time.
Communication Skills: It is unlikely that you will perform every aspect of your work alone; times will come when you will have to work with others on a daily basis. Strong communication skills will enable you to build supportive relationships with those whom you work with. You will be able to work better together and achieve more than you ever could do alone. When you require another person to do some work for you; you will want to communicate in a manner that will enable them to perform the work to the desired standard, in the fastest time. Should any errors occur, you will want to raise the issue quickly and explain clearly about the adjustments that need to be made. In these situations, the quality of your communication directly impacts the quality of the work that gets done.
Questioning and challenging: If you want to work to the highest standard, you must be willing to challenge anything and everything which does not meet your standards. This begins when somebody attempts to assign a task to you. If you do not think that you should be the person to perform the task; you must raise the issue and challenge the person that is assigning you the task. When you begin to do this, you will often see a decrease in the amount of work that gets delegated to you. Quite often, people delegate work to you because it is convenient; not because it is the correct course of action. If you want to improve your time management skills; this must become a thing of the past. As stated earlier, eliminating work that you should not be doing is the beginning of prioritization. Questioning and challenging are essential skills to help you achieve this. Questioning and challenging are also essential when you are being assigned work that you should be doing. Never accept a task until you are crystal clear about what is expected, for example:
What is to be done?
When it is to be completed?
How much is required?
The manner in which the work is to be performed
Any other details which impact on your ability to complete the work
If you have any objections, you should raise them before giving your firm agreement. Taking the time to achieve clarity at the beginning will save you far more time in the long-run.
Delegation/Outsourcing: Just as others will want to delegate work to you; there will be times when you want to delegate work to others. You will want to ensure that all the important work gets completed but that does not mean that you have to be the person to complete it. One of the most essential ways of managing how you spend time is to know when you are not the right person to perform the task. If the task is more suited to somebody else’s skill set; you should consider delegating the task. Of course, when delegating, it is important that you provide all of the necessary information and ensure that the person who will perform the task is clear about what is expected of them.
Coping Skills: Things will go wrong from time to time. You can be certain of that. When things do go wrong, you can sit around wallowing in despair or you can review the situation, identify the correct course of action, and implement that action. Time management is not just a behavioral skill. It is cognitive too. Your thinking and mindset play a massive role in determining your results. Knowing how to cope with setbacks will help you bounce back quickly and reduce the amount of time lost when things go wrong.
Manage Pressure: With work comes pressure. Pressure in itself is usually a good thing. It motivates you to take action and to do a good job. However, once you begin to feel that you can no longer cope with the demands placed upon you, you begin to move from the pressure to experiencing stress. Stress is not a good thing. When you experience stress, your body and mind begin to suffer. Large arrays of mental and physical problems have been linked to prolonged exposure to stress. Before you get to that stage, stress begins to have a negative impact on your performance and your time management. If you experience stress, you will have so many things on your mind that you will find it practically impossible to focus on the task at hand. As a result, it will take you longer to perform even the simplest of tasks. A backlog will start to build up as you fall behind which in turn increases your stress levels and so the spiral continues.
Patience: The importance of building an essential time management skill is about ensuring that you get the important work done. You could try to focus on getting more done but you end up rushing things and making mistakes. By the time you have rectified the mistakes (if it is possible to do so) you will have spent more time than if when you had taken your time and done the job properly. Patience isn’t just a virtue; it is a skill. It is something which you have to practice. The very best time managers do not rush things. They have patience and take precisely the amount of time required to do the job properly.
Conclusion:
If you want to get the best results possible from your life, you have to effectively spend time. Time management skills are essential. As you build an essential time management skill, you will find out that you get more valuable work completed in less time. It is not about increasing the quantity of work that you complete. It is all about ensuring that you complete your most important tasks which will enable you to achieve your goals quicker and with less stress.

By Nihinlola Eunice Olowe, Psychology & Research Department, Institute of Counseling In Nigeria.