Keeping time

Now you’ve ditched the Christmas tree and gift wrap and dragged yourself back to work, it’s refreshing to realise the opportunities that the new year can offer. Managing your time well can boost productivity and reduce stress. Often, though, we don’t know where to start.

Francois Smit, time management trainer at London’s Centre for Strategy and Communication, says fear can often stop people seizing control of their own working life.

‘We often don’t pursue goals we set for ourselves at work because we don’t know if we’ll be successful,’ he says. ‘In this country, you show that you’re a good worker by working for hours. But in Germany, for instance, if anyone’s in the office after 4.30pm they’re considered to be inefficient.’

Mr Smit says voluntary sector workers, who often play an important role for housing providers, are particularly afflicted: ‘We feel we’ve got to do our best for other people… and then we don’t have enough time for ourselves or the others that need us.’ He suggests a few tips to get started on overhauling your daily working schedule.

Email is one of the main distractions for office workers, says Mr Smit. ‘It can enable us to procrastinate. When we have a piece of work that’s hard it means we can do something else rather than concentrate on what’s really important.’

Treat email like the post that comes once a day, he says. ‘Because of the nature of email, we seem to think that we have to be at everyone’s beck and call at every moment of the day,’ he says. ‘Turn off the pop-ups and pings and tell people you will be answering emails twice a day.’

Interruptions

‘Do you answer the phone because you need to be loved?’ asks Mr Smit. ‘If your job is to do strategic planning, your key objective is not to be answering the phone.’

Being nice to people by operating an access-all-hours open-door policy can mean that a standard 37-hour week sprawls into a 50-hour one. Let people know that you’ll be available for half an hour twice a day and limit your access to visitors.

The first piece of work you tackle in the morning should be the most important, says Mr Smit. In his parlance, this is called ‘eating the frog’.

Are you making the best use of your time? People can waste a lot of time and energy reacting to crises, doing routine chores and tasks, procrastinating and working on trivia. How proactive are you compared with reactive? Draw a pie chart and see how you split 24 hours between work, health, family and ‘me’ time - is this balance as you would like it to be?

Mr Smit says that many time-poor people can only cope with their job by drinking a bottle of wine at home every night, then collapsing on the sofa - only to repeat the shebang the next day.

‘You have to ask yourself, “Am I happy?”’ he says. ‘Some people are using work to cover up a huge void - “I’m working hard because I don’t want to go home because I have a horrible marriage or I don’t like myself”. If you feel like you’re always on the verge of being tipped over, you have to act upon it.’

Delegate work if necessary and make sure that you are clear about the process and outcomes you expect from the person taking your work from you.

‘Lots of people go to meetings just because it’s Tuesday morning,’ Mr Smit says. Tired, routine meetings lead to idle banter and a lack of focus. Is every meeting necessary?

‘Is there a different way of getting that information from people rather than taking them away from their desks?’ he asks.

Working out your value per hour can throw redundant meetings into stark relief. If 10 hours of meetings a week are costing the company £500, can you prove that the outcomes of those meetings justify this?

Mr Smit suggests limiting everyone’s time to 10 minutes, asking people to present their views in five key points. Moving ‘matters arising’ from the minutes to the end of the meeting can save time, he says, because this is where people take the opportunity to regurgitate time-consuming moans from the last meeting.

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