It is often said after some calamity or other that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Well foresight is a pretty good trait to possess too, and in time management it can be a godsend. The ability to plan ahead can ensure that your time is managed with maximum efficiency. Dealing with matters as they come along leaves too much to chance so, while there is always the possibility of interruptions caused by unforeseen circumstances, a carefully planned day should generally be a more productive one.

Planning ahead can give structure to your working day. A poorly planned day can lead to all kinds of undesirable consequences, such as working through your lunch break, feeling overwhelmed and taking the stress of work back home with you at five o'clock. So while it is often a good thing to cut the amount of time you spend on some other tasks, you should take as much time as is needed in planning your day.

Probably the biggest step you can take in ensuring you have a well-planned day is to take great care in organising your to-do list and look out for any time-saving measures you could implement while compiling it. For example, tasks that require the use of the same application (email, word-processing etc.) could be grouped together in order to save the time of switching back and forth between applications.

Look at your workload and ask yourself if the demands being made on you are realistic. If you think a deadline is impossible to meet then, rather than go through the stress of trying to meet it but failing, ask for it to be extended. Trying to meet an unreasonable deadline in a last minute rush leads to desperation, which in turn leads to more errors, which in turn leads to more time lost, which in turn leads to a greater sense of desperation. It is a downward spiral.

Make full use of your diary and calendar and enter all of your appointments, even those trivial ones that do not take up a great deal of time. By logging them all you will prevent the potential time lost in rearranging double-booked appointments.

Don't shy away from delegating tasks out to those who may be better equipped than you to deal with them. You may be able to carry out a minor correction to some artwork yourself, but the graphic designer will do it far quicker. And that letter you need to have in the post tonight may be better typed by a secretary, who may clock in at 100 words-per-minute, far faster than you. Make notes of those tasks you think could be better done by others.

Check to see if there are any tasks on your list that you really dislike doing, and, if so, consider putting them off till another day or delegating them to others who may have more stomach for them. The prospect of having an unpleasant task ahead can prey on the mind and cause distraction.

Schedule non-work-related communications into your free time and stick to it. Business memos and emails should be to the point and waffle-free. Even if the recipient of an email is someone you know, resist the temptation to include details of the great weekend you have just enjoyed. Not only will this slow you down, but the time it takes for him to get back to you with a reply to your query, and a monologue on how great his own weekend was, will only waste more time.

So some simple planning can streamline your working day to achieve greater efficiency. And if you adhere to a sound regime of time management, then you will become even more adept at spotting ways to plan your day for maximum production. Time management is an increasingly sought-after skill as good managers know how to make the most of this valuable resource. The study of time management techniques is a worthwhile step for, although technology may progress and working practices may change, the number of hours in a day will remain constant.