Ever travelled home from work wondering what you have actually achieved in that day? Puzzling over where the time went?
In jobs that are very structured, with lots of client meetings or appointments, it’s clear where your time has gone. If you work alone and have control over your own diary however, it can be trickier to work out if you’re using your time well, and frustrating wondering why you never seem to get the important stuff done.
There are two steps that will help:
- Track your time for a week
- Plan your time in advance
It’s pretty straightforward. You need to know how you are spending your time now, and armed with that information plan how you want to spend it in the future.
Track your time for a week
If you are someone who likes data this will probably be fun. If you’re not, you may well find it a bit of a nuisance. The results pay off immediately though, as if you can persevere through a week you’ll have a great overview of what your work week actually looks like. If you were asked to estimate how you spend your working hours now, there’s a good chance it won’t match up what the data actually shows.
Start off by filling in a time tracker. You could choose to create one yourself, laying it out in blocks of time. It’s best to keep the blocks to 1 hour maximum, as otherwise what you write in them becomes too vague.
You can find a free downloadable excel spreadsheet with a time tracker here. It’s based on half hour slots, and allows for working time from 7am to 10pm.
A few tips to get you started:
- You don’t need to input every email you sent. Group like things together, e.g. marketing, emailing, reading etc.
- This is only to track your work. Unless you particularly want to, leave the cells you are not working in empty.
- Updating it once a day won’t work – you are unlikely to remember exactly what you were doing at 11 – 11.30am at bedtime. Try and update it every hour. Tedious but hugely useful.
- Don’t wait for an “average” week. There’s a good chance you don’t have an average week. Unless the week coming up is very unusual, e.g. you are at a conference all week, get started on the one ahead.
Once your tracker is complete, have a think about the following questions:
- How many hours do you spend on the core parts of your role, compared to unimportant things?
- Are there any surprises?
- When do you feel most awake and able to concentrate at work? Are you doing key work in that time slot?
- Are there any tasks that take longer to complete than you had realised?
- What could you have done differently?
Plan your time in advance
Armed with the knowledge you now have, think about how you could make better use of your week. Planning out every half an hour of the week to come might be useful, but it might not be flexible enough. However, it’ll make a big difference if you plan when you are going to do the “big” things that need to happen in the week ahead, and plan them at a time when you’re most likely to concentrate well.
You might want to think some of these things through:
- What is the most important thing you need to do next week? When will it happen?
- How can you group activities together in the week ahead to use your time better? Could you plan to do out of office tasks one day, or set aside half an hour for email twice a day, or plan to blitz some admin at a point in the week when you tend to be less motivated?
- Are there a number of smaller tasks that you could batch together and hand to a volunteer or outsource?
- How could you best use the “low” points of your week? Perhaps you’re always tired on a Monday morning and could use that quieter time to read a couple of chapters of a book you want to learn from.
Effective Third Sector 