Make Life Easier For Yourself

Modern technology can be a blessing and a curse. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends by phone and online and it makes finding out the facts we need at home and at work easy. But there are disadvantages. Those emails keep flooding in whether you’re at work or not - you come back on a Monday morning and your inbox is bulging. Clients and customers can contact you wherever you are if you give them your mobile number – you can never switch off.

But if you organise your time at work more effectively, you’ll get more done in a day and have less to do in the evening and at weekend. The first step in organising your time is to realise how valuable it is. So it’s important that every minute of the working day is used effectively.

There are many ways in which you can waste time: starting work late; being disorganised; being easily distracted or doing unnecessary work. Let’s have a closer look at these:

* There are several reasons why people start late. These include not getting out of bed early enough, having a coffee and chatting before getting down to work – or just laziness.

* Some people always seem to be disorganised. Simply by being more tidy and planning what you need to do you can save a lot of time

* There will always be interruptions and distractions, but you can keep them to a minimum. Chatting to colleagues, personal telephone calls and time on social media can be avoided.

* Some people do work that is unnecessary. This might be because they are disorganised and duplicate work that has been done already. Or, they do simple work that could be delegated to someone else.

You can save valuable time by avoiding these major time waster. In addition, there are several things you can do which will help you to use your time more effectively:

List your jobs The more organised you are, the more efficient you will be. So each day, why not list all the jobs you have to do in order of priority and then do the most important ones first? Any jobs you don’t complete should be put on the next day’s list (or if you discover it’s not really necessary, cross it off the list). If you do this you’ll be surprised at how much more time you seem to have.

Delegation Another way to save time is to delegate as many jobs as you can to others. This doesn’t mean trying to pass on all your work (or the tasks you don’t like) to others. But it is a waste of time if you do routine jobs that less senior people can do. However, make sure you delegate jobs to competent people and give instructions clearly and then check that they have been understood. Otherwise, they will make mistakes and you’ll spend unnecessary time correcting them.

Meetings Finally, if you have to organise or attend meetings keep them as short as possible. You don’t want to waste time sitting around and drinking coffee. So, draw up an agenda and stick to it. If necessary, set a time limit on proceedings.

Follow these tips and I’m sure you’ll find you can pack more into your day – or get through your work faster and leave yourself more time for doin