1. Communication

One of the most important skills in any business (where everyone is talking about) is effective communication.  It’s not just sales talk or negotiation.  It’s about communicating and understood by the other party.  Communicate clearly with your co-workers and clients, make sure all instructions and information are understood the way you want it to be.  Repeat and re-emphasize when you need to.  It doesn’t mean that you talk well is equivalent to being a good communicator.

By speaking clearly, concisely and checking back with that other party has understood what you have said, you can save a great deal of precious time

2. Planning

You can’t start without proper planning.  Be it a long term project or a short term ones, or a recurring one.  You need to plan.  You have to plan for the day, the week and the month.  Planning is essential to maximize your available time for the tasks you put forth and also for achieving your goals.

3. Prioritizing

Planning allows to list out all the things that needs to be done.  But we only got a certain amount of time that we have in our life.  We need to prioritize what is important to us.  Look at your To-do lists everyday.  Which one is more important and needs your attention first?

4. Procrastination

One of the biggest problems we humans encountered is procrastination.  The key thing is to admit that you are procrastination then identify the tasks that you put off the longest. Once you know which things you are likely to procrastinate about, find out the reason why you are not doing it.  By identifying the reasoning behind your procrastination issues, you can find solutions.  They can be breaking into smaller pieces, or plan the task as priority or find the best working time that you find most efficient at. Eliminate procrastination from your life and you see how much you can achieve everyday.

5. Delegation

Remember again, we have limited amount of time in a day.  You need leverage to do more tasks than what you can do alone.  Delegation comes in.  Delegate some of your routine tasks which you can quickly instruct someone else to take responsibility of.   Some of us may not like delegation as they find it a hassle to “prepare” the person for the task.  But before you think of that, give yourself the doubt that through proper communication, you will be able to automate some of the routine tasks, thus allowing you to work on the more important ones to you.

1. Create a Task List with the tasks that comes in your head.  Give them a priority, the level of importance, the scheduled dates and time for execution and completion.  Register them into the list with an initial assessment of the importance of the task first.  Whatever that comes into your mind, write it in the list.  You can filter them at a later time.
2. Determine the importance of new tasks.  Compare the new task with the other existing ones in the list.  Is it urgent?  Does it require your immediate attention?  Is it strategically more important to work on the new task?  Will there be implication/benefit for working on the new task?  (Implication and benefits are subjective to individuals).  Is the new task essential to be completed first as it is predecessor for subsequent rewarding tasks?  Determine the importance of the new task.
3. Put the new task in its right order in your Task List.   Remember, it may not be worked on immediately but at least you have scheduled to work on it at a later time.  The important thing is to set the schedule, get your self disciplined and follow the schedule accordingly.
4. Review your time on the tasks.  Are you spending time on a task more than what you’ve planned in the Task List?  Are there implications/benefits for not completing the current task?  Is it ok to switch task as you’ve scheduled other tasks to focus on or is it detrimental to your overall productivity if you switch tasks?  Re-arrange your time.   Also, re-assess your capability on the task such as the time taken and the output.  Were you consistently able to complete the tasks with quality as per planned?  If not, is it better to put more realistic targets to achieve?
5. Finally, do not multi-task for utmost priority and important task. Handle this task first.  You need 100% of your concentration, energy and brain-power for this.  Regard this as an investment of your brain-power for something that can give you good rewards.  DO NOT multi-task.  Remember, multi-tasking is not for everyone.  It works great maybe for your co-workers.  Or it MAY LOOK great for your co-workers but in actual fact they are not productive at all.  Focus on that single task with 100% concentration.

Following these 5 simple steps not only allows you to get your things done on time and as per expectation.  It also gets you to spend time for yourself and things that are meaningful only to you (beside plain work).  Besides, relaxation is also a task that you should list it in the Task Lists recover yourself for future challenges.

1. Plan a list of tasks to be completed in the day.  Planning is straight forward.  The difficult part is to stick to it!  Do not be influence by external forces.  Focus on what you had planned out
2. Focus one task at a time. Do not toggle between tasks.  It’s counter productive as you need to reset your context every time.
3. Put injects aside unless it is of utmost urgency or it is of substantial strategic value.  Focus on the task or else, you won’t be able to complete it.
4. Stick with the normal lunch break hours.  Sometimes it is great to reward yourself a longer lunch break but avoid the temptation to habituate it.  That is 1 hour.  No longer than that.
5. Stop chatting on the instant messengers (e.g. MSN, ICQ, eBuddy and Google Talk).  You won’t be able to concentrate on your task as you need to switch back and forth between the messenger and your task.
6. Avoid surfing Facebook and Friendster.  What is productive with playing Restaurant City, following what others are doing or checking out friend’s profile?
7. Avoid surfing aimlessly on the internet for jokes and games.  Come on.  There’s nothing productive about it.  Do something meaningful.  Do it when you have the free time or needed something light at work.  If you spend more than an hour a day doing this, something is quite wrong with you at work…
8. Avoid meaningless conversation with co-workers such as gossips and rumours.  Learn to say “no”.  You got something important to do now.  Striking a conversation on your co-worker’s latest Coach Bag maybe important to your co-worker but it may not be yours.  What’s important to you?  Getting the current task done, right?  Weigh out what’s important to you.  And do not worry of hurting her feelings.  Your co-worker would definitely be able to look for someone else to strike a conversation with.
9. Avoid taking tea breaks that is longer than usual.  It’s sometimes good to reward yourself but as the same goes with lunch breaks, avoid the temptation to habituate it.  You can achieve more things than taking tea breaks.

The list may suggest that we do not allow “leisure time” to exist in the workplace.  It can exist but not too much and not at the expense of the needed for important tasks.  Also, the list may suggest that we work like machines and close all doors of communication with your co-workers.  Not at all.  Do it at the appropriate situations.  You still need to socialize with your co-workers to build rapport.  Sometimes it’s unnecessary to talk about your co-worker’s cat but sometimes it can be a lightening topic.  Our advice, is keep it minimal and always think back what is the most important thing for you to do (continue the conversation with your co-worker or continue with the task that is supposed to be delivered the coming Friday)

What are your super-productive tips?

We’re going to introduce you a power concept that will make you efficient and productive at work.  It’s called the 24-hour pay check.  It’s the base principle in getting self-disciplined for time management (good time management requires self-disciplined).  Everyday, you are given a pay check of 24-hours.  No more, no less.  However, this “free” pay check can only be utilized in a day.  Like a one-day voucher at the shopping mall.  You cannot ask for more (time) in the check nor can you deposit and reuse it for another day.  You have to use it in that day only.

In a normal weekday, you spend 7 hours sleeping.  3 hours traveling to and from the office.  You work average a day of 8 ½ hours with lunch breaks included.  Now how much time do we have left?  That’s an estimated 5 ½ hours left in the pay check.  With the remaining 5 ½ hours left, you need to have breakfast, buy groceries, shower, dinner and washing the dishes.  Say that takes another 3 hours.  You’ve got 2 ½ hours left.  These 2 ½ hours will be your only leisure and self-improvement time.  Not forgetting if you have kids, part of the remaining hours will be used attending to their needs… And all this CANNOT be brought forward to the next day!

Now you can see that time is a precious commodity and we should treasure every expense of it.  Using this powerful concept, we can identify what are the time wasters and what are the things to do to be productive.  The time spent at the workplace is an average of 8 ½ hours.  1 hour is used for lunch break.  ½ hour is used for tea break.  Another ½ hours maybe spent at the water cooler on gossips and rumours.  Back at your desk, you enter into procrastination mode for another ½ hours in and out throughout the day.  You received an average 6 phone calls of 5 minutes interval every day and this sums up to another ½ hour being used.

How much time is left from the 8 ½ hours?  We’ve left with 5 ½ hours… yes, we’re not finished yet.  You have to handle fire-fighting tasks such as co-workers’ enquiries/requests and attend to emails.  That will be another 1 ½ hours.  You spent time chatting on the instant messenger for another 1 hour throughout the day.  This includes time to respond to your buddy and time wasted flipping your tasks and the instant messenger.  Finally, with all the things going on in the workplace, you give yourself another ½ hour of personal breaks throughout the day.  Let’s not also forget that there are people who spend time reading newspaper or looking at stock prices at work…

Now how much time do we have left?  Only 3 hours is left for you to do actual productive work.  Can you see how much time is really effective used if you were operating daily like this?  If you can optimize the time, wouldn’t you be able to achieve more things in a day?  Now re-look your daily schedule in the workplace.  Does it resemble anything like that?  If it does, our advice is you need to rethink of the important things in life (and office) for yourself.  Of course, “important things” can mean differently with people.  But if you stumbled upon here seeking for time management solution, you will know deep in your heart the definition of “important things”.