Time is more value than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.
Jim Rohn
Time spent means it’s gone and it you won’t get it back. I don’t necessarily mean that in a dark and gloomy way: oftentimes you create beautiful memories, you get stuff done or you have expanded knowledge and experience. But in essence, it’s true: you only have so much of it. You divide it between your home, family and friends, assignments at work, development and so much more. So, it is important you manage your time to the best of your abilities. The better you are in planning, the more you get done without you losing your mind. Planning is an important element of success.
Today, we talk about the five things you can do to better manage your time.
1. Time Management Starts With Planning
To make sure you achieve what you set out to get done, you need to understand what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. For that, you list – ideally written down – your short term goals and assignments. By doing that, you create a clear overview of what needs to be done. You can list your own goals and the goals you have been asked to do by your management. Listing it truly helps in preventing you forgetting to do something. It also helps with being clear on what needs to happen in case you are tasked with something urgent and important last minute.
As you work through your list of assignments and goals, you easily keep record of what’s achieved, added and deleted. It takes a little bit of getting used to and discipline to keep doing this, but as soon as this becomes a habit, it will be easier. Don’t be surprised if this even becomes second nature.
2. Plan Your Day
The more difficulty you have with planning your time, the more important it is to meticulously plan your day. In order to ensure you spend the appropriate amount of time on one of your tasks, build in time limits. Block that time on your calendar: prevent you spending too much time on certain tasks, especially if that takes time away from what is equally or even more important.
On that note: “Eat a frog early in the morning”. This means as much as starting your day with something difficult, something you don’t like doing or are putting off. You’ll be the freshest when you start your day. In addition, you will ‘ride the high’ the entire day after you’ve achieving something hard. The rest of the day should be easier: the hardest task is already behind you.
3. Create a System
Arguably one of the harder things to set up and maintain but very important. Being disorganized costs a lot of time. If you don’t have a proper system, you won’t be able to quickly locate, retrieve and find files, information and forms. Think of your recruitment role – not having a good system to archive your interview notes and resumes will make it practically impossible to retrieve them when you have an opening later on. Or, in case you need to report data internally or externally, you will lose valuable time collecting the necessary information. That is, if you’re able to find it at all.
4. Use What’s Out There
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are multiple ways to keep track of what needs to be done and when. Many are beautifully integrated with other tools: think of Tasks in your Outlook, Reminders in your iPhone and other apps and tools, such as AnyDo. If you want to take it up a notch, you can schedule your tasks and projects using systems like Asana. But remember, the more complicated and intricate you make it, the more difficult it will be to turn it into a habit.
The simplest ideas oftentimes work the best: a notepad and a pen is all you need to quickly write down your goals and tasks. Marking the task as ‘done’ will quickly become a wonderful and gratifying feeling you’ll work towards.
5. Create Good Habits
All this is aimed at creating habits. A habit is something you do almost automatically, without thinking. When you have set and fixed routines that you do on set and fixed times, your efficiency will increase. You’ll be able to plan better and – it’s a bit of a paradox – become more flexible when life throws you a bit of curveball. Creating routines and habits will help you stop wasting your precious resource: time.
On that note: find out where you are wasting time. Where you can be more effective, and where you do things you shouldn’t be doing. Do you spend a lot of time cleaning up before your day starts? Do you lose time going through your social media – even the business-related platforms? Make an effort figuring out which tasks help you achieve your goals, build in moments to work on those other things – if you truly need to, and stick to it.
Building a habit takes time, and at times, it will be two steps ahead and one step back. As long as you keep moving, you’ll move forward.
About us
AskAway disrupts the way recruitment is done, by eliminating the need to plan and schedule time-consuming meetings in packed agendas and by offering tools to record or even prerecord interviews. This allows you and your hiring team the opportunity to share and analyze the candidates for your interviews when it suits you. We pre-screen so you don’t have to: talk about the ultimate time management tool.
Contact us to find out more, or sign up for a no-strings attached free demo of our tool here.
