1st Bac - Time Management

Jane arrived at work and found 70 emails in her inbox and a note on her desk to see her boss as soon as possible. She had two meetings in her calendar, three important phone calls to make and an urgent report to write with a deadline of 5.00 p.m. Her Personal Assistant said she also needed to sign a contract urgently.

Her colleague, Maria, asked her if she wanted to have a coffee. Jane smiled and said, ‘Sorry, no time for coffee this morning. I’m too busy! I always have too much to do and I don’t know where to start. You’re busy too, but you’re always very relaxed. How do you do it?’

‘It’s easy,’ said Maria, ‘you need to think about your priorities, then make a list and plan your time. Let’s get some coffee and I’ll show you what I mean. The secret is to decide what is important and what is urgent.’

To be successful at work you must manage your time well. As Maria said, you need to decide which tasks are the most important to meet your objectives – you have to prioritise. You also need to think about which activities are urgent – these are tasks which you need to complete quickly, perhaps to meet a deadline. Other people, your manager, your colleagues or your customers often ask you for things very quickly, so these tasks are urgent, but are they important? Good time management is about deciding which tasks are the most important for your objectives and the business, so you complete these first.

Have a look at the table below. It’s a useful time matrix which many professionals use to help with decisions on time management.

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	1 Tasks that are important and urgent.	2 Tasks that are important but not urgent.
Not important	3 Tasks that are not important but are urgent.	4 Tasks that are not important and not urgent.

Look at box 1, these tasks are important and urgent and you should do these first as a priority. What next? The problem is that many people want you to complete tasks for them quickly. So you often have lots of tasks in box 3, these are urgent but they are not important for you and your team. Sometimes you spend lots of time doing these tasks and forget about box 2, the bigger tasks which are not urgent, but are very important to achieve your work and career objectives. You may want to take time to prepare a report or do research, for example, but then something urgent arrives on your desk and you do this first. The tasks in box 4 are neither important nor urgent, so perhaps you could delete them, or give them to someone else.

Listing all your tasks in a time matrix like the one above helps you see which are the most important for your objectives so you can plan time to do them. To do this you need to make a to-do list with all the tasks in your calendar. There are many digital planners and apps available now with checklists so you can see which tasks you have done and which you need to do. A notebook and a diary are also fine and easy to carry with you. However you do it, if you invest some time in planning, you’ll learn to manage your time better.