The first step to improving productivity at work is by assessing your current time management skills.  Tracking how you spend your time can help recapture that lost time for achieving your goals.

Do a ‘time audit’

As you go about your tasks during the day, write down what you are doing and how much time you spend doing it.  Do this for about 3 days and then sit down and have a look at where your time has gone.  You might find that there is the same person who interrupts you every day for a chat or a process that you can initiate to avoid people asking you for certain information e.g. a form.  If you are honest and write down everything, you will soon pick up a trend of where and how you are wasting your time.  Once you have analysed your list, you can start changing the way you do things.

As a colleague

Ask someone that sits close to you to watch you during the workday and let you know if you have developed unnecessary habits that take up your time e.g. stopping at a certain day to go to the canteen, chatting to a colleague every time you go to the ladies etc.  Be open to what they tell you and identify areas where you can improve!

Self-assessment

A questionnaire can be a useful tool to do a self assessment on your current time management techniques.  There are many self-assessment tools designed to be used by professionals, management and staff to assess how well they manage their time and deal with the following:

• Time wasters e.g. drop in visitors, procrastination, indecision
• Other people’s priorities
• Fire-fighting (crisis and priority management)
• Being organized
• Delegation

Your can determine your present time management skill by completing the Time Management Self-Assessment Questionnaire developed by John W. Olmstead (2010).

Effective-Time-Management-Skills-Self-Assessment-Questionnaire

Once you have completed the questionnaire, you can use the answers to identify areas of poor time management and put a plan in place to improve those areas.