Skills Required for Effective Time Management

Time management is a key essential that ensures any working environment runs efficiently and smoothly, without it there is no structure to your working day. If time management can be mastered then your workload can be achieved successfully. In this essay I will examine a number of the skills required for effective time management.

Planning is of the utmost importance in time management, without it we don?t have a clear vision of what needs to be achieved and within what time frame. It is therefore vital that this is the first step, and in order to ensure you cover all areas that require your attention.

Planning

Planning your day or week can be daunting to many people. Some managers are born to it and some will struggle. To prevent or reduce stress within the office environment planning is essential. It can be categorised as short, medium or long term. Short term can be classed as a day or week, while medium is normally weeks leading to a few months. Long term tends to be several months perhaps leading to a year. So the first and obvious step is to put a time frame in place, and ensure that you use planning aids to mark your progress. Planning aids come in various forms. Diary?s and wall charts are very useful, especially for ?at a glance? scheduling, and will assist the manger during the normal working day. Diaries are a good start as they come in various styles e.g. day to a page or week to a page, the latter I prefer as it gives me an oversight as to what?s happening during the week. Wall charts again come in various designs and display the whole year. Colour coding the days with the relevant colour key can at an instance enable you to see the overall picture, and can also be used in conjunction with your dia...

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...and are clearly taken for granted is e-mail and the telephone. E-mails can be set up to be received in various colours to indicate your superiors or colleagues. E-mails should only be looked at first thing in the morning and again in the afternoon, this prevents you being distracted and allows you to concentrate on the goal in hand. Telephone calls can be a nuisance if not controlled. Go straight to the point and if possible inform the caller of any time constraints. If feasible an answer machine can be utilised so you can filter out those unimportant calls, of course a message on the answer machine rather than an automated reply is more user friendly.

In conclusion time management is a very important tool for modern day managers. With it managers can ensure efficiency is at the highest level with continual improvements with in any office or organisation.