Are You Making the Best Use of Your Time?

Whether you are an HR professional, manager, or individual contributor, chances are that you've felt overwhelmed at one time or another -- or perhaps you're in a constant state of inundation! In fact, you've probably read at least a few of the terrific time management articles that have been written. While most provide strategies for using "to do" lists and managing information overload (an important skill these days!), this article takes a slightly different approach.

Ask yourself the following question:

Instead of grumbling about how "swamped" you are, have you ever stopped to consider why you spend your time the way that you do?

Techniques for handling three possible answers to this question -- tradition, requests for assistance, and social calls -- will be presented in this article.

Tradition

When performing routine tasks, we often give little thought to the "bigger picture." This holds true whether we inherited the responsibility from a predecessor or have been doing it ourselves for years. After all, the procedure made perfect sense when first established! Circumstances may have since changed, however, resulting in an outdated -- or even unnecessary -- activity.

Examine your current tasks in relation to the following four questions:

• Why?
  A helpful way to determine whether you must continue to perform a certain activity is to consider what the consequence of not performing it might be.
• How?
  When developing alternate techniques to perform an activity that cannot be eliminated, it's important not to limit your options to those that are only slightly different than the status quo. Be creative. You might find that the same results can be achieved -- or even improved -- with a time-effective method that is radically different than your current one.
• Who?
  Perhaps you are unable to accomplish as much as you'd like because you take on more than can reasonably be handled by one person. If this is the case, you may wish to consider delegating some of your work to others.
• When?
  Unfortunately, some routine tasks are unavoidable. On a positive note, because they generally do not require concentration or large blocks of uninterrupted time, there is no real need to schedule them. Instead, perform them during idle time, such as between meetings or while on hold during a telephone call.
The copyright of the article Are You Making the Best Use of Your Time? in Human Resources is owned by Christina Morfeld. Permission to republish Are You Making the Best Use of Your Time? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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