How to manage your time

Effective time management plays an integral role in improving the quality of your everyday life by helping you to reduce stress, gain control and self-confidence, and give you a sense of achievement by increasing your productivity.

Antoinette Lortan, Executive and Life Coach and owner of Human Mirror Coaching and Consultancy explains that time management is a deliberate act that should be constantly revisited to ensure that you are still making the most of the time at your disposal. Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities to increase effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. Time management is straightforward, but it takes self-awareness and self-management.

Lortan teaches that effective time management is the key to personal success; it allows you to be in charge of your life, accomplish more, work more efficiently and make better decisions. “When you are pressed for time and have to make decisions, you are more likely to jump to conclusions and not fully consider all the options available, which leads to poor decision making,” she says.

When it comes to practical application, it is important to start off by analysing how you currently go about managing your time. Do you have a monthly plan that you break down into weekly and daily objectives? Do you prioritise and re-prioritise your tasks daily before you leave the office? Effective time management starts with being able to prioritise your activities to determine whether they are urgent, important, both urgent and important, or neither urgent nor important. “People with poor time management skills tend to prioritise tasks, and therefore their time, according to who shouted last and loudest. Interestingly, loudness normally correlates with seniority, which discourages most people from questioning and probing the real importance and urgency of tasks received,” says Lortan.

The following time management matrix has proven to be very valuable in assisting with the prioritisation of tasks and assigning time to them. Lortan explains that people tend to spend most of their productive time in quadrants 1 and 3, while any spare time is typically spent in quadrant 4, which consists of activities that ‘steal’ time, efficiency and productivity. She adds that most people spend the least time of all in quadrant 2, which is the most critical area for success, development and proactive self-determination.

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst – William Penn