Planning is central to time management. It is formed of two elements:
SETTING OBJECTIVES + PRIORITISING
Once you have your objectives clear, you can go ahead and prioritise. But is this as simple as it sounds?
If you don’t have some idea of what needs to be done ‘today’, ‘next week’, ‘ in the future’, you cannot begin to prioritise.
As most people feel stressed by time pressures on a day-to-day basis, the first logical step is to make daily “To Do” lists (which can be augmented by weekly and monthly ‘To Do’ lists).
Write tomorrow’s list before you leave work! Give yourself 10/15 minutes at the end of the day for this task.
Then assign priorities to each task on your “To Do” list using the Four Quadrant approach:
| 1 | Urgent and important : top priority | Must be done today |
| 2 | Important but less Urgent | Should be done today |
| 3 | Urgent but not Important | Needs doing now |
| 4 | Not important, not urgent | Could be postponed |
Quadrants 1, 3 and 4 are where a lot of people spend their worrying lives!
Quadrant 1 activities are needed to achieve immediate results
Quadrants 2 is where you plan and is a place from where you can reduce pressure on Quadrants 1 and 3.
Quadrant 2 activities impede results.
Quadrant 4 activities are wasted time.
Do the “1s” first. “2s” need to be looked at every day to avoid them becoming “1s” or “3s”.
Avoid doing the easy tasks first
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This Time Management training course is designed to help participants develop their skills in time management to achieve more effective results in less time.
This Delegation Time Management training course is designed to help people working under pressure in hectic work environments to manage their time proactively; to work smarter - not harder - and achieve better results and greater satisfaction.