BrightSkills

As a trainer and coach, a lot of my work is about helping people to become more successful whether that's in setting goals, achieving these goals, managing their stress, developing their skills...... the list is endless.  A topic that comes up again and again is the whole area of Time Management, Planning and Prioritisation.

As a trained time management coach and facilitator, I use the 4 Quadrants Model with my clients as I believe that a higher level model like this - based upon strategic visioning, goal alignment and meaningful planning gets the best results.   I tend to take a 'big to small' systematic approach to time management. 

However, I've recently noticed a lack of diary management with my clients.  I've observed the following practices - all of which lead to higher stress levels, forgetfulness, inaccurate sense of time planning and of course poor performance or outputs due to in many cases, not enough time to get things done!

Over the last few years, I've observed that one of the most common root causes of poor time management and planning is something that can be improved almost immediately..... Keeping a Diary and Managing that Diary Well.  Below I have outlined my Top 5 Tips for Diary Management, I really hope that you find these useful and easy to implement.  Please do share your thoughts and feedback on the matter!

Top 5 Tips for Diary Management

1  Keep a Diary

It's important that you keep a diary whether it is online or in paper.  If you're just starting out, I recommend keeping a small paper diary which provides 1/2 pages for each day.

"I don't keep a diary, I've a great memory" - OK that's cool, you don't need to always keep a diary but answer these questions for me;

• Do you ever forget commitments or appointments?
• Do you ever remember things last minute, even if you started out with lots of time to get things done?
• Do you often feel like you're 'firefighting' - waiting on the next urgent thing to come along?
• Do you prioritise activities which have long term value but no immediate impact for you?
• Do you do this every week?

If you're answering 'Yes' or 'Sometimes' to the above questions, then I believe keeping a diary (paper or online) will help you to really plan and measure your capacity daily, weekly and monthly.

2  Weekly Diary Plan

Once a week (Friday afternoon or Monday mornings are best), take some time out to plan all of the activities for the week ahead in the following way;

• Commitments / Appointments / Meetings already made
• Lunch / Break times (always put these into your diary - this is planned & important time!)
• Planned Activities (outside of commitments / meetings)
• Personal Tasks / Time

3  Daily Diary Update

Update your diary at the beginning or the end of each day but treat the activities planned in your 'weekly planning time' as if they were your best customers - don't sacrifice these for the sake of unimportant or urgent activities - get better at knowing what an emergency is for you.

4 Plan for Emergencies

Always plan some time in every day for 'unforseen activities' and 'emergencies'.  The amount of time you need for this will depend on your role but I find that about 1 hour a day 'contingency time' is useful - I usually plan this for 30 mins in the morning and 30 mins in the evening.  This way, I can put the unforseen things that come up during the day to one side and deal with them all at once (batch processing)- being more effective and getting things done smarter!

5  Diarise 'Non Committed' Time

Diaries are not only for meetings and appointments with other people.  If you plan to spend 2 hours doing a report on Thursday morning then that should be shown in your diary - OWN YOUR TIME or somebody else will !