Time management skill development

In the previous articles in this series, we discussed various avenues to develop skills for effective communication and presentation, negotiating, selling, leading and managing.

Sales people, small business owners and managers need these skills to be able to persuade, influence and achieve sales and business growth. For them, these skills are more important than inward focused skills such as personal time and resources management and they frequently rely on their colleagues such as their secretaries or team assistants to manage these activities for them.

However, personal skills such as time management, goal and priority setting, written communication, and working alone with personal productivity tools such as computer desktop tools are more important tools for people who work as business analysts, researchers, designers, software developers, writers, journalists, administrators, back-office workers and professionals and business owners doing similar work.

Their success is determined by the quality and quantity of their output. Therefore, they should always be on the look out for new ways of working more efficiently using mechanical tools, software and work processes. They have to sometimes get off the fast lane of work, look at how they go about their day-to-day functioning and determine what can be done to improve the value they create. In this and the next article, we would explore local as well as online resources to train and practice better self-management.

Let’s start with time management. Do you often find that a whole day has passed before the most important work has not even started - a day spent in meetings, phone calls and a number of distractions that ate vital time when you should have been focused on the core business or project.

Learn how to schedule your week, day and hours, how to say No, maintain your focus and gain control over your time.

Let’s first check out a few local workshops for time management. Public workshops in Sydney are run by Derek Stockley. Corelink and Frontline Management Institute are other private providers of courses in time management locally in Sydney.

University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) offers a full day ‘Priorities and Time Management’ course at a reasonable course fee.

Master Your Time offers ‘practical strategies to make the most of your time’.

Books may also help you get master tips, techniques and practices to manage your time more effectively. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is a treasure trove of good advice and delves deep into personal time management. It also has a recommended format of a weekly scheduler with detailed notes. If you like this approach to time management, then you can dive deep into it by reading First Things First which is another book by Mr. Covey.

Some other books on time management are:

101 Ways to Make Every Second Count: Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success with Less Stress by Robert W Bly.

10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management by Hyrum Smith

Once you have learnt the techniques, it’s time to put these to action. The tools you need may be just a simple diary or an ordinary garden variety organizer. But for even better effectiveness, you may choose to use some desktop software or even a web service.

Microsoft Outlook, with its built-in calendar and meeting scheduling functions can help you plan your week and day in a basic format. However, it does not sufficiently support prioritizing of tasks, building long term goals, combining personal and professional commitments – issues that we all face in our day-to-day and long term personal management. This is where the tools come in. Let’s examine two of the popular tools – a desktop based tool called Achieve Planner and a web based service called Remember the Milk.

Achieve Planner by Effexis Software is a Windows based tool that helps you plan, track and manage multiple projects, organized your to-do list, manage priorities and schedule appointments. It has a 30 days trial version and the full version is available at USD 59. There is only one downside and that is I could not find a mention of whether it’s supported on the mobile versions of operating systems so it could be used on the move.

Remember the Milk is an online service that helps you manage tasks and your to-do list from anywhere, get e-mail, SMS or IM reminders, share your tasks with others, access from phone, manage tasks even when offline and a number of features that make it flexible, intuitive and always-available. It’s compatible with Google Calendar, Twitter, Blackberry, Gmail and iPod Touch / iPhone. You can create lists, get reminded by SMS and even add tasks by e-mail.

Having mastered your time, you’d feel much more empowered and ready to build on other skills such as written communication, analytics or simply better skills in whatever field you work in. We would check out the avenues to learn and find resources to achieve better personal skills next time.