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Analyzing Your Time

· Goal Setting,Time Management,Work Styles

​Can we ever get enough of them to help us become more efficient? As we say goodbye to another year by the end of this month, here are a few more things you can do to make yourself more efficient this week and in 2019 by Analyzing Your Time:

Get things done when you have the greatest energy – we all have bursts of high energy at different times. For some of us, it’s always in the mornings and for others, it may be the afternoons (or even evenings). Yet, sometimes, it’s periodic and we need to learn to strike while the iron is hot. For consultants like me, we need to have our “office time”, blocks of time that can be best used to work on bigger projects. In fact, I plan for those times, so I can get things done. What works best for you?

Look for the smaller tasks to fill in shorter time periods – converse to what’s above, you need to identify the items that can be done in small amounts of time yet be effective. Writing and responding to e-mails, making and returning short phone calls, writing personal notes (a dying art), taking a pulse on what you’ve accomplished and still need to. Do you have a list of those things ready at the hand so that when you get those blocks of 10-15 minutes, you’re ready to go?

And lastly, make sure that the energy you’re expending is proportionate to the expected outcome. It never fazes me when I meet fellow consultants who spend a great deal of time preparing for something that they will only use once. They are often trying to reinvent the wheel for every client, for every project. Not that preparation isn’t important; it’s vital, but if you’re putting in so much effort, be sure that there is a direct correlation to the potential gain of your efforts. Spending 60 hours preparing for a training program that will only last 3 hours, you need to review what you are earning for all of that effort. Now, if you see possibilities of using certain parts of what you’ve worked on again or if you realize that there are materials (like the learning instruments on our website) that are top quality adding value yet saving you time, isn’t it a no brainer?

Haven’t we all had days when we wonder: “what did I actually accomplish today?” Or “where did the time go?” These simple tricks (habits actually that we can make the norm and not the exception) can help you respond to those questions in a way that you’d like to have them answered, say if your boss was asking you.

"Stop looking for your purpose…………….BE IT”!
– Dr. Wayne Dyer