Time Management

Record your time and tasks

Firstly print out your time analysis sheet and attach it to a clip board. Over a weeks period this task should not take more than 60 minutes. Don’t write lengthy explanations to justify your results. You are the only one who will read your notes. Use abbreviations like CB for coffee break, T for travel etc..

You need to record the activity and how long you spent on that activity.

1. Compile your time log as you complete the task. It’s not a valid entry if you write in an entry two days later and guess how long it took. When keeping your time log, record each time you change what you are doing.
2. Keep your time log recording accurate for at least one week.
3. Time management is not about showing off to other staff in the workplace, its about improving your own productivity by assessing how you can work more efficiently by making wholesale time changes in the future.
4. Time logs aren’t designed to give you more time to work but to allow quality time on more important objectives.
5. Compiling a time log is a discipline. Have you the discipline to do something about your current work practices?

Where To From Here?

For much of the working day many of us are unaware of how quickly the time goes by. We glance at our watches, groan ‘that can’t possibly be the time’, and when the day is over, complain that we don’t know where on earth it actually went. This can happen irrespective of whether or not we happen to enjoy what we are doing.

Most of us don’t have a ‘typical’ working day, so it’s of limited use to lay down rigidly the best way of charting our current use of time. But we need to have some idea of how this time is portioned out between the various activities in which we are most frequently involved. This is best done by keeping a record over a whole week. Choose a week which is reasonably representative of your usual working routine, and at the end of each day enter as accurately as you can under relevant heading the time spent on each of the activities concerned. In order to help you with this, try to make scribbled notes during the day of the exact time you switch from one activity to another. At the end of the week, average out your findings so that you get a fair idea of where each day actually goes. Using broad categories,.

You may want to use the following example as a starting point for your own time record:

TIME RECORD

TIME SPENT EACH DAY (Hours/Minutes)
ACTIVITIES	MON	TUES	WED	THURS	FRI
Travel during working hours
Dealing with correspondence
Telephone - connected with work
Telephone - not connected with work
Tea/coffee breaks
Lunch
Formal meetings
Conversations
Filing and record keeping
Moving around the building
Writing up - case notes, reports, documents
Paperwork
Hunting - time spent searching for documents
Daydreaming
Task time - time spent directly on main professional tasks