If you don’t know how to manage your time effectively, you shouldn’t be surprised when you find yourself working overtime, says Paul Yuck, Ottawa-based president of Priority Management, which helps professionals improve their strategic planning and productivity skills.
Today’s professional environment requires a greater emphasis on self-management, explains Yuck, which means having a structure in place to keep you and your team focused.
Yuck explains the three necessary steps to building that structure:
1. Define your long-term strategy
A successful organization requires an “esprit de corps,” says Yuck. “An esprit de corps is really just a shared common set of principles, processes and tools,” he explains, “that brings together a diverse group towards a common goal.”
In order to know what your daily, weekly and monthly tasks will be, you and your team members need to understand your “big picture” and how everyone fits into that picture.
For example, you might see yourself moving towards a more specialized practice for medical professionals. Once you have established that goal, it’s easier to break down that initiative into sections and determine the range of steps required to move towards that objective.
2. Set up performance management and measurement standards
This involves knowing what success will look like in relation to your long-term strategy. “Trying harder” is not enough, says Yuck. “It doesn’t get us anywhere because we have no detail.”
The specifics come from knowing your long-term strategy and how that breaks up into smaller steps. Start out with a one-year action plan and think about what must be accomplished monthly, weekly and daily. You must also designate a person to be responsible for each of those elements.
If you take the example of developing a specialized practice for doctors, your projects could include: 1) introducing your idea to the doctor clients you already have and asking for their thoughts; and, 2) networking through your city’s medical association.
An initial step might be asking your associate to talk to the existing doctor clients. You ask the associate to compose a short report compiling your clients’ feedback in terms of suggestions and opinions and set a deadline for delivery of the report. With that deadline, your associate can choose how to arrange his or her time so that the report is completed within a reasonable time, and existing job duties continue to be performed.
As the face of your practice, you decide to handle the networking required by this initiative by attending the medical association’s monthly meetings. You commit to reporting your observations about the events to your team the next day.
By providing deadlines to specific tasks, you are managing your projects regularly and aligning your team’s duties with your long-term strategy.
3. Focus on the right task
Maybe you and your team members find yourselves distracted by diversions like social media. The problem isn’t the diversions themselves, says Yuck, but the priorities you give to those tasks.
Setting the right priorities, such as researching local networking events in a timely fashion, will come from understanding the impact of failing to plan properly.
For instance, networking events usually happen on a monthly basis. If you’re not aware of when a particular event occurs and you miss it, you must wait another month to begin building your contact list.