In 5 Effective Time Management Tips we offered some techniques to manage your time more effectively. Using these techniques helps you achieve more in a day and significantly improve quality of your life. Let’s find out how.
 
 
 

Reduced Stress

A lot of us experience stress when we feel that we have far too much to do and don’t think we will finish a task on time. One of the main advantages of time management is its ability to reduce stress. By effectively organising your time you would be able to complete your tasks on schedule and have time to relax, thus reducing your level of frustration.
 

Increased Productivity

Managing your time not only allows you to concentrate on important tasks but it also increases your productivity. If you organise your work you would probably be able to complete more tasks within a certain period than you would have dreamt of. Instead of having to rush through all your tasks to try completing them, and perhaps not doing a good job, you can take your time and produce quality results.
 

Improved Satisfaction and Confidence

If you haven’t completed some of your tasks at the end of a day as you had no time, you probably feel guilty. With effective time management you will be able to complete more tasks and produce quality work. As your productivity will increase, you will feel proud of the results you’ve accomplished. Thus in turns will give you a sense of satisfaction and boost your level of confidence.
 
 

I hope you have found this information useful, if you would like to learn more about time management, please feel free to look at our Time Management Articles.

Do you, by the end of every day, feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you had to do? Do you feel disappointed that you haven’t accomplished what you intended to do and instead wasted your time on other tasks or interruptions by your colleagues? If you answered yes, then here are 5 tips for effective management of time.
 
You only have a certain number of hours in the day, so using your time more effectively can help you achieve more in a day and meet your deadlines without stressing yourself out. It does not mean that every minute of your day should be spent working, it is about effectively planning you day to maximise your productivity. So, choose just one of the tips below and try it for 10 working days. If that does not help, pick another one.
 
Work in Your Flow
We all have times during the day where we feel on top of the world and can do anything. And at other times all we want to do is sit down and watch TV. Figuring out what times of the day you feel most energetic about working can be a huge benefit to you. It helps you feel more motivated to do your work, and you could get a lot more done in that short time ‘flow’ compared to the rest of the day. When you’re in the “flow,” you are so absorbed in a task that you lose sense of time, you feel in control and things just get done. So you could allocate that part of the day to your most important task of the day.
 
Prioritise Your Tasks
Prioritising your work can be extremely advantageous to you. By organising your jobs you will find it a lot easier to work out which tasks need completing. Knowing what needs to be done and in which order ensures you spend your time and energy on tasks that are truly important to you.
 
In order to prioritise your tasks first write them down. You don’t need to write down an entire list of everything you need to achieve, maybe just five or six of your main tasks. Once you have done this, take time to analyse which tasks you feel you have to accomplish first. Take a pen and mark them down.
 
Don’t Multitask
Multitasking is myth. If you are trying to work on many tasks at the same time you will not be able to focus on one task. As a result you will produce a mediocre result. Effective time management is not about doing many things in short time it is about doing right things. So try to focus on finishing your tasks one after the other within a reasonable time frame, following your daily to-do list and focusing on your key priorities.
 
Delegate
When you have a lot of work to do on your own you might want to think about delegating a task to someone else, so you can concentrate on more important tasks.
 
First you need to look and identify what task you want to pass on. Make sure you do not simply delegate a task which you find unpleasant, but a task which will free up your time for more important task to complete . Second, you need carefully choose a person to whom you are going to delegate a task and ensure that a person is able to complete the task.
 
Take a Time Management Course
If you struggle with managing time then take a Time Management course. You will learn different tools and techniques to effectively plan and control your workload. These techniques will not only improve your time management at work but also help you in your everyday life, so that you can achieve life-work balance.

Working from home has become more popular in recent years. However, since working from home tends to blur the boundaries between work and personal life it can be a dream come true or a nightmare. Here are the top 7 tips for Effective Working from Home:
 

Have Your Own Work Space

It would be great if you could have a space, preferable a room in your house that you could use for working. You could organise it into a small office: put in a desk, a computer, have a telephone line and some shelves for filing. Thus you will put yourself in ‘work’ mode once you have entered the room.
 

Organise Your Work around Your Natural Schedule

When working at home you may have the luxury of making your own schedule. You might need to take your kids to school or walk the dog, so why don’t you organise your work around those activities? Make sure your boss is aware of the structure of your day in case he needs to contact you.
 

Make a To Do List

When working from home you are more likely to get distracted than when working in the office. If you are having trouble deciding what you need to do, you could lose motivation and end up drifting off your work. Making a to-do list will allow you to plan out what you need to achieve during the day, and the best time to do it. If you know what you what to achieve, it helps you keep focused and makes you feel good as you are making progress towards your objectives.
 

Keep Back Up Copies

It always a good idea to keep a copy of any files you need in case anything happens to your Internet connection and you need your files. When transferring any files it’s advisable that the data is protected, so encrypt it.
 

Keep in Contact with Colleagues

When you work from home you can sometimes feel isolated from your colleagues, therefore keep in contact with them on a regular basis. It will help you to be informed about any changes in the company, or projects you are working on. Make sure you have different technology in place, such as phone, email, instant messaging, so that if one way of communication goes down, you still can be reached.
 

Make Sure That Your Family Know You Are There to Work

There are things around the house that could potentially distract you from your work, such as doing chores or playing with your children. Have a talk with your family to let them know that even though you are at home you are unavailable to play or help at the present time.
 

Take Breaks & Don’t Overwork Yourself

If you follow the tips above, working from home will be a lot more productive, but don’t forget to take breaks every so often, go have a cup of tea or just stretch your legs. This helps you feel more motivated to carry on with the rest of the day, whereas you could give yourself a headache looking at the screen all day.
 

Once you have finished working for the day you can now sit back and relax. But if you cannot stop thinking about a task you need to do, or a new idea you have then the best thing to do is make a note of it and come back tomorrow. Don’t start working again, enjoy being home.
 

Check out our Time Management Articles for more information about managing your time.

Stress can be a major block in a person’s working life and can attribute to poor health if it builds up too much. A recent survey carried out by the Insurance Group AXA shows that in the past 4 years, stress levels in the UK have doubled so there has never been a better time for you to start combating your stress.

National Stress Awareness Day is an annual event organised by the International Stress Management Association which seeks to promote awareness of just how damaging stress can be and to offer help to those affected by highlighting the many coping strategies and help sources available to them.

Stress can be brought on by different factors in the workplace such as tight deadlines, ineffective time management, problems with colleagues, and problems with equipment.

Here are a few tips from the International Stress Management Association UK website, organisers of the National Stress Awareness Day.

Learn to manage your time more effectively:

Learning to prioritise your daily tasks can help reduce stress in a big way. We at Infero can also help you here as we offer Time Management Courses in our wide range of Business & Technical Courses.

Learn to compromise rather than argue:

In most conflicts, there is usually a way in which both sides can achieve a positive outcome. Try to find this compromise rather than arguing and raising your stress levels even more.

Don’t take on too much work & know your limitations:

Taking on more work than you are capable of completing is just asking for trouble. Once you accept to complete something for a colleague, you don’t really want to be letting them down and if you have other tasks to complete at the same time it becomes stressful.

We at Infero would also like to help you overcome your stress barriers and therefore we have a course to help entitled Creating & Maintaining Life Balance. The course will help you learn ways to manage your stress effectively and ways to improve both your physical & mental well-being.

Contact us or give us a call and we’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have about our courses and how we can help you.

Once you have set up a meeting, the clients could potentially ruin your well planned out schedule. Here are 3 tips which can help you to avoid these disruptions.

Don’t get left standing on your own.

To ensure this doesn’t happen; a good suggestion would be to ask the clients to arrive 5 to 10 minutes before the start of the meeting so that you can start going over the schedule briefly and then this won’t affect the start of the meeting.

Don’t let your meeting be disrupted by anything!

A good idea is to request that clients switch off their mobile phones or anything else that could go off and disrupt the meeting.

Avoid unnecessary meetings.

Clients can also majorly eat up your time if they request face to face meetings with you to discuss minor points and you have to travel to meet them. To try and avoid this travelling, you should try to extract from the client exactly what they hope to gain from these face-to-face meetings and see if you can settle their qualms over the telephone or some other way which wouldn’t dramatically affect your schedule.

Okay, so you have a schedule all drawn up for your daily routine but the only trouble is that you keep being distracted by fellow employees asking you questions, making conversation, making comments or completing more tasks to your originally well planned out schedule. All these distractions can dramatically impact on your Time Management and throw your schedule into disarray. What you need is one of Infero’s Effective Time Management Training Courses.

If this is the case in the office, you could try using some headphones to give the people around the picture that you are busy and that you don’t want to be disturbed.  To eliminate any background noise present in the office, you could use some music through the headphones which will help drown out the background noise and help keep you focused on task. Also any Instant Messaging Clients active on your computer should be set to Busy so that other people are aware that you are unable to talk at that particular time. Another handy tip to use in an office environment is to make a ‘Do not disturb’ sign to hang by your workspace to alert people to the fact that you do not wanted to be disturbed.

In the case of having extra jobs offered to you, you need give a firm but polite refusal in order for you to complete any tasks you are working on at the moment. A polite yet firm refusal such as ‘I’m sorry but I can’t work on any more projects at the moment’ is much better than a reluctant acceptance for both parties as it means your schedule is unaffected and that the request can be completed by somebody who can give it their full attention.

More Time Management Articles

To enquire about our Effective Time Management Courses, get in contact with us by either phone or email.

IT Courses and Effective Time Management Training are vital tools to help businesses become more efficient and improve staff morale.

According to the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, one in four companies which fail to train their workforce closes down. This compares to a figure of only one in nine for those that do provide staff training. It’s a case of train to gain.

Benefits of training on business revenue.

Still not convinced? Try this… The Sector Skills Development Agency says that employers who invest in training and certification experience a quick return by:

• Improving skill levels by 51%
• Improving productivity by 22%
• Improving customer service by 22%
• Improving employee morale by 20%
• Increasing profitability by 12%

Effective Time Management

Effective Time Management Training Courses can be invaluable in helping your colleagues achieve objectives by encouraging more efficient ways of working. These training courses can help your staff identify the differences between urgent and important tasks and produce a workable strategy for achieving the previously unachievable. Please get in touch if you want to help eradicate the time-consuming pointless chores and concentrate efforts on tasks that deliver results. We host a popular effective time management seminar and a range of IT courses.

When money is a little tight, as it is for most businesses these days, a sure way to guarantee success is to invest in the little gems your company already holds, your employees.

Let us say you have 25 employees, what is the best way to maximise your revenue? By making cut backs? Definitely not. You already have a group of hard working people who know your business inside out, so all you need to do is get them working a little harder, faster and more efficiently and you will see the results from your hard work and loyalty paying off in no time at all.

Time management is something that we are generally quite poor at most of the time. We should start work at 9, but things get in our way, we’re on the phone, forget to buy breakfast, the stress is too much, I need another cigarette break. All these distractions are cutting away at the time we should be using to focus on our business and make more money.

It’s not just you that wants results; your employees want to be good at what they do too. Time Management training and IT courses can teach them it all, so that they possess the right skills to do the best job in the most efficient way. If you train your employees to be able to adapt in business, when you need to make changes, they are ready and fully prepared to take on any new challenges. You will probably be surprised to see leaders starting to develop and become more efficient in the workplace, making your job more relaxing.

Studies have shown that training has a very positive impact on productivity, with some showing an 80% rise. And not only will it improve the amount of work your people do, but the quality will be staggeringly higher.

IT courses are perfect for honing in those all so important business skills and making your work look more professional. From memos to producing complicated formula reach spreadsheets, we can show you how to look great, feel great, and be great. So join us for Effective Time Management seminar to find out how we can help you.

Ever looked at your list of tasks wondering what to do first? Well, you are not alone.

The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) suggested that the results and the causes of those results are unequally distributed in the ratio of 80:20. The Pareto Principle, more commonly referred as the 80/20 Rule, states that:

•  
  • 20% of your activities will generate 80% of your success, or
  • 20% of a well time managed effort will generate 80% of the desired results.

Although the ratio 80/20 is not always this precise, it is used to put emphasis on how much is lost or how much can be gained with time management. It is not a surprise that identifying the critical 20% is the key factor to success.

A simple Time Management course can certainly help you to learn some tips and tricks and teach you using your time efficiently. But what can we do NOW to minimise our time wastage?

The key in identifying those critical 20% is by prioritising your tasks. You may use the Eisenhower Method to help you with that. It said that former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower used this method in prioritising his daily tasks.

To determine your priorities you will need to use a matrix, where you evaluate each task according to its Importance and Urgency. If you use this matrix then you will need to focus on Important tasks. If your tasks are

• Important and Urgent, then do them immediately
• Important but Not Urgent, then enter them into your calendar to keep track of them
• Urgent and Not Important, then delegate them to a competent person
• Not Urgent and Not Important are time wasters, so minimise them

This is common sense but you would be surprised how much this method will positively affect your productivity. For more info, read our future blog articles, or come to our Effective Time Management Courses and seminars.