Time management, a vital theme for businessmen (part 1)

Without any doubt, not having time to perform our tasks is one of the problems businessmen face today. Even though it can be true that we might have to perform many activities on the day, I think the real problem is about organization, prioritization and time management. But the good news is that we can change many things on our day in order to organize in a better way our day and maximize our time. In this post and the next ones I will share with my readers some tips that might help them to spend in a better way their time.

 

Email on determined hours

The email is a great tool that helps us to share information and communicate in a very fast way. However this tool can also become a problem because we receive many messages every day, many of which are not important four our job. The difficulty with this is that when we receive them and read them we stop performing what we are doing. This is the reason why I have learned that it is better to check our email at specific times of the day.

I open my inbox when I arrive to the office, at the middle of the morning, before I go to lunch, at the middle of the afternoon and before I leave work. You should decide the schedule in which you are going to check your mail and stick to it. The good part of this is that when I am checking may mail I am only preforming this task which will make me more agile to answer them. With this, you might ask yourself what happens with the urgent mails. With time I have learned that urgent mails become fast calls that are much more effective.

 

Effective Reunions

Other subject that is useful but can also turn into a problem are the reunions. I think that for this theme an organizational culture must be created, pursuing three things. The first is we must organize and assist to reunions when it is necessary, in other words we should not fill our agendas with reunions of themes that can be worked in more effective ways such as assignments.

The second is that when we reunite, we should define the subject of the reunion and we should only work on this. Many times we waste time of our reunions in topics that don’t have anything to do with the subject we should be talking and discussing.

Finally, people must learn to be punctual. We should not lose more than 10 minutes waiting for the persons that must assist to the reunion. If someone is missing the reunion should start and if the person that does not shows is vital, it must be cancelled and not stay waiting for him. However I think we should all learn to cancel our reunions in case we cannot assist because we must also respect the time of the other people. Also we must take into account that the reunion must also finish on time.

 

On my next post I will continue sharing other advices in order to organize our time in a better way daily. Wait for it on some days.

 

Image taken from Flickr.com