As co-founder of Health and Fitness Travel, the leading experts in healthy holidays worldwide, Paul Joseph shares his top 5 tips on how to manage your time effectively to ensure you are productive and efficient throughout the day.
- Prioritise
Prioritising your tasks can make a huge difference to your work efficiency. Once you have accumulated your week’s work to be done and prioritised anything urgent, fish out the shorter tasks and get them done first. It is much more efficient to get tasks that will take an hour here or there out of the way before tackling some longer, more challenging things. Furthermore, concentration levels vary throughout the day so designate the longer tasks for a time when you know you will be more focused and stimulated.
- Plan Productively
Planning productively is an absolute must when it comes to time management in the workplace. Without a plan of your work, organisational skills will go out the window, often resulting in you forgetting about vital pieces of work. Create an Action List on Microsoft Excel to enable you to manage your time in relation to the number of tasks you have. Plan ahead in the week by designating time frames to complete certain tasks and enjoy the freedom to manage your own work. Some tasks need doing every day, so by slotting in an hour every day designated to that particular thing, your progress is continuous rather than attempting to catch up if and when you have time.
- Organization
Organization is a fundamental step in ensuring you are efficient in a workplace and one way to boost these skills is through using a calendar. Inputting information about meetings, events, deadlines or reminders to contact someone on a specific date into a calendar completely eliminates your chances of forgetting something, and therefore efficiently using your time in the workplace. Using a calendar will also increase your chances of completing deadlines early as you will be aware of future happenings.
- Multitasking
Discover if you are a person who can multitask or not. If you can, then great, as you will get things done quickly, but for those of you who multitasking doesn’t come naturally do, don’t force it. If you do, chances are you will get confused with the different things you are doing at once and muddle up information, resulting in mistakes. Concentrate on one thing at a time as you will probably get things done overall just as quickly as someone who can multitask.
- Ignore distractions
Everyone has that one type of distraction – a mobile buzzing, online newspapers, online chats or even a co-worker bothering you. In reality, we can’t change the number of things that interrupt us but we can change how we deal with them. Switching off a mobile phone is the easiest way to eliminate distractions, which nowadays will also banish online chats as well. Ignoring as many distractions as possible will result in much higher concentration levels and productivity.
