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Time Management Skills: Improving Through Actions

If you want to have confidence that you are taking the right actions at the right time for the right reasons you'll need to improve your time management skills. Do you have a daunting amount of stuff overflowing in your stack trays, so many emails you don't know where to start, and so many voice mail messages it would take hours to just listen to them all?

By Cheryl A. Clausen

If you want to have confidence that you are taking the right actions at the right time for the right reasons you’ll need to improve your time management skills.  Do you have a daunting amount of stuff overflowing in your stack trays, so many emails you don’t know where to start, and so many voice mail messages it would take hours to just listen to them all?

Perhaps all these things are building up because you just can’t figure out what to take action on, what action to take and when to take action.  One way or another, an action will have to be taken to make them all go away and to remove the clutter from your environment.  The act of making a decision is part of this time management skill.  As you look at all this stuff you may be overwhelmed even thinking about how to decide on what to take action on.  There is a simple solution to that.  You will take action on each thing until an action has been taken on each thing up to a certain date and time.  Don’t get scared we’re going to figure out how to do that next.

Rapidly do a quick sort and go through each thing in your in box deciding the action you will take.  Begin with just one of your in boxes and review each item in whatever order you want to.  As you touch each item quickly evaluate it to determine if you can take care of it in less than two minutes, if you can go ahead and do it and be done with it.

For those items that require more time, if you know the next action you need to take enter that action on your weekly To Do list.  You don’t have to worry about organizing and prioritizing your To Do list because you’ll be prioritizing your list each day, and checking things off as you do them.  By the end of the week you have a lot of things checked off, and only a few things to carry over to the following week’s To Do list.  When you discover something that doesn’t need an action, delete it or throw it away.

Sometimes you’ll have an idea you want to think about later.  Add your idea to the future planning section of your To Do list.  Sometimes you have things you want for for future reference.  Set up a file folder for those reference items and put the item in the right folder.  There isn’t any reason to make this folder or filing system complicated because if you do you won’t use it.  A simple way to organize your reference folder is to have a folder for each topic and then organize the items within the folder alphabetically or by date or in any way that makes sense to you.

Prioritization is another time management skill.  Some of the items from your inboxes are now on your To Do list.  The next step is to determine when to take action on those action items.  There is a simple and time saving way to approach this that doesn’t make you feel overwhelmed.  Once a week put together your To Do list with everything that needs to be there not worrying about organization or prioritization, your only concern is getting all things that require an action or future consideration on this one list.  Then each day scan your list of actions and prioritize only the top 3-7 things that if you were to take just those actions would make your day successful.  When you use this time management skill you consistently take actions and you consistently take the right actions.  You don’t need to tackle everything at once you only need to take on the most important things.  After a couple weeks you may decide that some of the actions on your To Do list really don’t need to be taken.  Once you do this quick sort and make your action decisions to get control of your inboxes make a commitment to clear your in boxes at one point each day so you don’t get into the situation of having overflowing inboxes again.

Author: Cheryl Clausen can help you get unstuck. To find Time Management Tips get her free ecourse. Enhance your Time Management Skills, check this out.

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