How Productive Is Your Time?

Many of us embark on a career and then get into a comfortable routine with our job. After the initial training and learning curve, we settle back, knowing what is expected of us and how to do it. How often do you challenge yourself continually at work? Perhaps the work itself presents challenges, but are they always outside your comfort zone, helping you grow as an employee or are they just (shock, horror) wasting your time?

Wasting of time happens when you lose productivity at work. The key to successful time management is not only simple things like timekeeping itself, but being productive during your time. Some of us cannot tell the difference between something that is productive, or a distraction. The difference becomes more obvious when we stop - on a daily basis - and analyse what we are doing, and how productive it is.

How do you go about doing this? For example, let's think about a small business manager who owns a delicatessen. How would this manager spend his or her time? Tasks should be broken down into productivity according to certain labels such as staff, customers, accounting and so on. For example, talking to a customer in the shop, no matter how pleasant, would score poorly for productivity. Running a questionnaire to measure customer satisfaction with prices, on the other hand, would be far more productive for the business.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the manager should not talk to customers, only that there are usually more productive ways of doing it. Another example would be an office worker having to organise the Christmas party. You can either do something time-consuming such as asking everyone which venue you should pick when they have a spare moment, or why not mail out a Word questionnaire, giving them a choice out of four that you've researched? Far more productive - and far more effective.

Many of us lose productivity through doing things that we think are important, when they really aren't. Do you stand by the photocopier at it churns out the 100 copies of the meeting minutes? Multi-tasking is another key to increasing productivity. Read the minutes while you're there. Read the latest company report. Go back to your desk, leave the machine running and get the email ready to announce the distribution of the minutes. In fact, let people collect their copy from your desk in their own time, do not waste 30 minutes going around handing them all out.

Unfortunately, as in the example above, some of us go into a routine "zone out" when we have tasks that aren't particularly productive, but that we have to do anyway. Learn to recognise when you are at your least productive. Write down your tasks at the end of the day and score them for how much they really contributed to your job. Are there any that can be done at the same time? Are there any that you're doing out of habit or obligation that can realistically be delegated to someone else now?

The key to being more productive is awareness - and then action. If you are struggling to analyse your own productivity, perhaps a time management course would help you identify and improve areas that you find it hard to work on. After all, that would be an extremely productive thing to do in the long run.