TIME
BANDITS...
...the enemy
of the year!
By Maggie Love
Pitman Training London EC2
Who stole the year?
Remember celebrating New
Year – and all those plans you made? Well suddenly another year is
gone. That’s 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,760 hours gone in a flash. Blame
your time bandits and this year make a determined effort to catch
them!
Did you achieve the
goals you set yourself last year, meeting your deadlines and sailing
through without tears and stress? You may be smugly in the world’s
top 10% of highly motivated, goal-orientated and organised people or
more likely, like most of us, you are usually running to catch up.
If you constantly feel you are being mugged and robbed on the time
front, read on to find out more about your time bandits and how to
beat them.
Time
is the most precious finite resource in the world. You can’t store
it in a bank vault or a safe or conserve it in any way – and as for
time management, by definition there’s no such thing so forget it!
Time will be spent with or without your consent, control or
management – and once spent, it’s gone!
Given that you can’t
control or manage time what can you do? Your one and only option is
to manage yourself. You can direct and organise your own effort and
energy on activities of your choice to fit into the time you have
available. If you manage others, you will also need to help them to
do this. Easy peasy? Well, yes, if you can first identify and
understand your personal time bandits and use a few cunning
techniques to lock them up for the year, or maybe even for
life.
Bear in mind:
-
A priority consists
of two elements in varying degrees – it can be important and/or
urgent.
-
Important is not
necessarily urgent
-
Urgent is not
necessarily important
Have a look at the grid
below – priority tasks will fall into either the top right or top
left square, both marked ‘important’. They will be important planned
activities or major crucial tasks, which have consequences if they
are not attended to right now. Your time bandits will be found in
the other two squares both of which are ‘not important’.
Do your own grid to help
analyse your typical work pattern.
|
URGENT &
IMPORTANT |
NOT URGENT /
IMPORTANT |
|
CRISES
FIRE-FIGHTING
UNPLANNED ACTIVITY
|
MAJOR ACTIVITY
PLANNED TASKS
|
|
URGENT / NOT
IMPORTANT |
NOT URGENT & MOT
IMPORTANT |
|
EMAILS
INTERRUPTIONS
OTHER EXPECTATIONS
|
SOCIALISING
PLEASANT
DISTRACTIONS
|
List what you want to
accomplish personally and professionally. Set challenging but
realistic goals and make sure you agree your work objectives with
your boss.
In selecting how to spend your time put
your tasks in some sort of priority every day in relation to meeting
these goals.
If you want to achieve, managing yourself and your time bandits is
definitely a must. Consider it Important & Urgent so do it now, then
set an Outlook reminder to review your progress every 3 months.
Good Luck!
PS. Do you know how to
set a recurring reminder in Outlook or is it a skill you should
acquire??
Call us on
(
020 7256 668
Pitman Training Centres,
London City or Oxford Circus
