Effective Time Management for Your Career

Effective Time Management for Your Career - Time Management is one of the most exploited topic on the web. There are so many web pages on Time Management published every month. It is this very difficult to find the time to read and understand all of them.

The key about time management is to put the things in practice - reading alone will not help and you need to practice what you read.

I this post we are covering some of the Basic Time Management Tools for job seekers and who are busy in managing their career. What we are proposing are very simple tools and it is not something which you do not know.

You may already know them - but not using them; or if you are using them - you may not be effectively using them. We are presenting it as a system to ensure that you pickup the approach and embed it in your daily routine.

Basic Time Management Tools

1. How to keep To-Do Lists

To-Do Lists are a great way to manage time. Keep a diary or a notebook and maintain a To-Do List. Then do them in whatever order they are in. Once you complete a task it can be can be ticked off regularly (yes this boosts motivation).

The simple To-Do Lists however do not gel if you have a tight schedule to be maintained. If you have lot more tasks then the time available to you you may land up in doing the unimportant taks.

2. How to prioritize your To-Do Lists

Once you have tasks on hand written then put them in order of priority. You can mark the priority in front of the item and rewrite again. Alternatively if you are little tech saavy, you just maintain a spreadsheet and then sort them according to priority.

Then you do them in that order. However note that if you have more than 20-35 tasks everyday them they may cause confusion. You can use the Tasks feature of Microsoft Outlook or Gmail to manage your tasks effectively.

3. Using “Do it now” Tags

If you handle a lot of paper you can use a method called “Do it now”. This prevents you from procastinating the task.

You basically use "Post IT" slips with "Do it now" written on the tasks or papers which are critical. You the do these tasks immediately. This is very good for those who have habit of procastination.

Many people even use this method if they fear doing domething - so they try to "Do the thing they fear most first". This works because once the most-feared thing is done, the rest will be easier in comparison.

It is very good for conquering fears at work. If you have joined the workplace new and fear something - try to "do that now".

4. More complex tasks - start Scheduling

Scheduling is very very simple - you the task list that you maintain just put the time along with it. And now act on them according to the time specified. This is very good where you have many people involved such as meetings etc.

However it is difficult if you are not actually estimating the time realistically - which may lead to one task extending into time of other task. Some of the best ways is to use a Calendar - like MS Outlook Calendar or Google Calendar. They are some of the best ways to manage the schedule.

While all of these are very useful in particular situations, and for particular people, they often work best in combination. Individual tools may not work always.

We will be talking more about time management in my next post.