Are You A Time Waster?

Your immediate answer to "are you a time waster?" is probably "of course not!" right? Most of us consider ourselves to be hard working, productive employees. Then why do we sometimes complain that we don't have enough hours in the day to complete our tasks? Why do we sometimes bring our work home with us? Why do we end up working late at the office? These are symptoms of wasting time - not on useless things - but on work with lower priority. There are common traps that catch people out, and make them end up wasting time at the office while with a little bit of organisation training and good will time wasting can easily be addressed.

Often the most organised people have a to-do list (or some kind of diary management for the day, perhaps in Outlook or a hard-copy of a diary). It's all well and good having the list, but do you prioritise it correctly?. This is one of the common traps - listing everything, then doing it in the order you wrote it down, rather than the order of priority. If you have to write up minutes from yesterday's meeting, yet you find yourself booking some travel for colleagues two weeks away, that's a good example of bad prioritising. If you have a list, compose it carefully to stop yourself working on lower-priority tasks.

Another tip when using such a list is that you should try to avoid multi-tasking all the time (of course sometimes, this is a good skill). If you start more than one "tick" off your list all the time, you're going to finish the day with two or three half-completed jobs, which will only add to your stress levels. Complete one task at a time - a job done properly is better than three jobs done poorly.

Another time-waster is giving your time to others. This sounds selfish, but in the true meaning of time management, it means not allowing others to (intentionally or not) waste your time. If colleagues are interrupting you for non-work reasons, it's best to gently let them know that you're really busy right now and you'll get back to them. It's great to socialise at work - it does wonders for morale - but if you spend an hour discussing your friend's niece's wedding instead of writing up a report, you're going to panic trying to claw back the lost time later.

If your colleagues come to you with work-related queries, then prioritise those, too. After all, their work may be higher priority and let the team down if you don't help them, whereas some things can be best sorted out later in the day or at some other time when you're both focused enough to concentrate on it. Done tactically, not letting your colleagues take your own time away can be a valuable business tool.

Remember to take note of how often you're putting time aside in other ways - answering calls if you really don't need to (and if there's someone else there available to answer), responding to emails that could have waited until tomorrow, for example, will add to the factor of lost time during the day. Of course, sometimes you'll have less to do on any given day, and those are the times to relax a little, help others, socialise and do all the other things that will make you a good time manager - and a good colleague!