We’ve all experienced the woes of time management at work. You wake up hopeful and optimistic—not only will you meet all your deadlines, but you’ll hit the gym and make a healthy home-cooked meal, too.

But research suggests that in an eight hour day, the average worker is only productive for two hours and fifty three minutes. So, we’re only productive for about three hours a day. Huh? By all means we are definitely committed, hard working with the best of intentions, and we’re definitely not lazy (well, not most of the time). So why?

But the good news is that there are ways to reclaim those seemingly elusive lost hours of the day. It’s all about personal time management—manage your time instead of letting it manage you. We know you can do ANYTHING but can you do EVERYTHING? – Follow these 5 tips to mastering time management:

1. Figure out how you’re currently spending your time.

If you’re going to optimize your personal time management, you first need to figure out where the time is going. Try diligently logging your time for a week by tracking your daily activities. This audit will help you:

• Determine how much you can feasibly accomplish in a day.
• Identify timesucks.
• Focus on activities that provide the greatest returns.

As you conduct this time audit, it will become pretty clear how much of your time is spent on unproductive thoughts, conversations, and activities. You’ll gain a more accurate sense for how long certain types of tasks take you (which will be very helpful for executing on a later tip). This exercise can also help you determine the time of day when you are most productive—that way, you know when to work on your projects requiring the most focus and creativity.

1. Plan and prioritise – Plan out your work day and stick to the tasks you ‘need’ to get done. Here’s a simple way to categorize your tasks

• Important and urgent: These tasks have important deadlines with high urgency—complete them right away.
• Important but not urgent: These items are important but don’t require immediate action and should involve long-term development strategizing. Strive to spend most of your time in this quadrant.
• Urgent but not important: These tasks are urgent but not important. Minimize, delegate, or eliminate them because they don’t contribute to your output. They are generally distractions that may result from the poor planning of others.
• Urgent and unimportant: These activities hold little if any value and should be eliminated as much as possible. These are the tasks that are due, are income generating, aligned to your When you can figure out prioritization, your personal time management can reach a whole new level. You will know where to focus your time during those days when there simply aren’t enough hours. When you can figure out prioritization, your personal time management can reach a whole new level. You will know where to focus your time during those days when there simply aren’t enough hours.

3.Value your time and skills –

Assess the tasks that are consuming your time on a regular basis that don’t ‘need’ to be done by you. WeKonnect as an outsource provider that can help you to complete your more time consuming yet important tasks and ensure you spend it on the most skilled and profitable tasks. At the end of the day return for your time and investment will dictate your success of the business.

1. Assign time limits to tasks.

Part of creating your schedule should involve setting time limits on tasks instead of just working until they’re done. To-do lists are great and wonderful, but sometimes you might feel like you never check anything off. If you’re looking to set a steady pace to your workflow, focus with frequent

breaks, reducing mental strain and maintaining motivation. Using WeKonnect as your paraplanning partner and your administrative partner will massively help you on this. Will help you to reduce the mental strain and keep you efficient.

1. Learn to say no – You’ll never learn how to manage time at work if you don’t learn how to say no. Review your environment and the habits of others around you. You can take control of managing your focus time to ensure you achieve your goals. Rather than doing a lot of tasks that yield little or no value, complete fewer tasks that create more value. Remember the 80/20 rule—80% of your output comes from 20% of your inputs. Focus your efforts accordingly. You could set specific times of the day to manage your email inbox and view social media. Consider working from home at times, or in another location to complete certain tasks, and remember – it is ok to Say NO – say it now – NO (Politely with reason)!
2. Get organized.

For effective time management, this tip needs to actually go on your to-do list. If you have piles of papers scattered all over your desk, finding the one you actually need will be like finding a needle in a haystack. There are few things as frustrating as wasting valuable time looking for misplaced items.

Not to mention how hard clutter can make it to focus. Little things make a big difference. Create a filing system for documents. Unsubscribe to emails you no longer need. Just think—you only have to do it once, but you get the benefits forever.

1. Finish the task – that’s right, stay committed and finish the task no matter what! Remember to reward yourself on your achievement, no matter how big or small. Life is to be smile.

Happy days!!!

If you wish to find out more about our services – we’re always happy to chat.