Don’t you hate going to a meeting and coming out feeling it was a waste of time? Or found yourself still sitting at the computer at 6.30 pm because ‘stuff’ happened to stop you getting on with more important work?

What was the ‘stuff?’ What, or who, stole your time?

At Phoenix we invest a lot in training our team and time management seems to be one of the most valuable tools we can give our people. I received time management training many years ago and am still using the techniques, which I am passing on to the next generation. (Thanks, Larry Johnson.) When someone is productive everyone benefits: them, your company and ultimately the country.

But let us concentrate on our own sphere of influence.

Timewasters

1. Email. Try leaving it off for two hours at a time, then build up to longer periods. If you were in a meeting for two hours that email would survive. Get on with an important task or phone calls without the interruption of unrelated emails.
2. Colleagues. Open plan is great for keeping teams connected but it can also create a distraction. If you have noisy neighbours do not be afraid to say at some point, ‘okay guys, chill out. I want to go home sometime today, I don’t know about you.’ Stand up for visitors and use body language to get them back to the door. Say, ‘can I get back to you for this discussion? I am in the middle of something right now...’
3. Meetings. If you are in charge, explain the reason for the meeting, have an agenda including when it will finish (no need to write it down for a quick catch up meeting) and keep people on track. It is important to let people have their say and it is your role to bring out the quiet ones, but once all the points are out, sum up, make decisions, confirm action points and stop the meeting.
4. Meetings. If you are NOT in charge but have difficulty with meetings running on or rambling, send this note to the convener!
5. The Boss. If your boss interrupts you and changes the priorities all the time, your best defence is to show him/her your clear plan of what you need to achieve and then ask him/her to make a call on whether the new task is more important than your existing plans.
6. ‘Stuff.’ Planning what you want your day’s outcome to be and using a prioritised to-do list should help keep you focussed so that discussions about the merits of one restaurant over the other for a team lunch should not intrude unless that is the business of the day. (See above, ‘can I get back to you...’)

Over the years I have discovered that there is a rule of thumb when you add a time estimate to your to-do list. It always seems to add up to nine hours. You do not want to spend the rest of your life working nine hours plus interruptions, so try to schedule six hours of activities each day, moving the less important items to another day or delegating them away altogether. (Note that I say ‘less important’ not ‘less urgent.’ You are trying to work on your most important tasks, not just the ‘urgent’ ones.)

Try it. Control of your own time is very liberating