How To Manage Your Time More Effectively

Before you start to plan how you are going to get more control over your time, it is important to identify which areas are in most urgent need of attention.  Putting the issues into an order of priority and dealing with the most pressing ones first will make your action plan seem far less overwhelming.

Read through the questions and mark yes or no for each one:

Your Priorities
1.	Are you sure what your main work objectives are?	YES	NO
2.	Are you clear about the amount of time you spend on the different areas of your life?	YES	NO
3.	Do you know what you will be doing in one year's time - and in the next three to five years?	YES	NO
4.	Do you find it easy to identify which tasks are the most important?	YES	NO
5.	Do you spend more time than you should doing routine jobs?	YES	NO
6.	Do you find that you have enough time to spend on important thinking and planning tasks?	YES	NO
Overload
7.	Do you often feel anxious or worried about getting work done?	YES	NO
8.	Do you know if you really have too much work to do?	YES	NO
9.	Do you always say "yes" to additional work, even if you are fully loaded?	YES	NO
10.	Do you cancel leisure activities in favour of work?	YES	NO
Delegation
11.	Do you prefer to do jobs yourself rather than give them to others?	YES	NO
12.	Do you see delegation as an important part of your role?	YES	NO
13.	Do you plan what and how to delegate well in advance?	YES	NO
14.	Are you willing to train and support others while they are learning how to do a task you have delegated?	YES	NO
Planning
15.	Do you always know whether you have time spare to fit in any additional work?	YES	NO
16.	Do you often take work home or stay very late to finish something?	YES	NO
17.	Do you find it impossible to get through all the work you have to do in a day?	YES	NO
18.	Are you often late for appointments?	YES	NO
Techniques
19.	Do you often put off work till tomorrow?	YES	NO
20.	Do you find it difficult to end a conversation?	YES	NO
21.	Do you allow people (or phone calls) to interrupt you at any time?	YES	NO
22.	Do you feel that meetings often waste your time?	YES	NO
23.	Do you have a large part of reading material to tackle?	YES	NO

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions - the activity has simply led you to identify the approaches and attitudes that you already find useful and those areas where you may want to develop new behaviours.  The "ideal" time manager would have answered:

"yes" to questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, and 15

"no" to questions 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22

Hopefully the quiz has made you realise that you are probably not such a poor time manager as you might have thought!  However it should also have given you some clues about the areas you might find it useful to work on.

If from taking the quiz you think you could do with development in this area but don’t have the time to attend a course, our suite of 21 E-Learning courses could be just what you are looking for. Our E-Learning courses, which include Time Management, will give you high quality material that is accessible, challenging and engaging that will make you want to come back for more.

For further information or to book a course please contact:

Faye Shipley
T:  01789 734300
E:  fayes@structuredtraining.com