Extracting the Most from your Time

Extracting the Most from your Time
As we all know time is supposed to be the most precious resource in business. To help you be the most productive person you can be try the following tips to help squeeze out every last drop of your time.

1. The last thing you should do each work day is write down everything you need to do the next day. You'll go home thinking of the next days challenges and return to work refreshed and ready to take on the new challenges. It is essential that you write these tasks down, or better still create time items for each one in one of our timesheet software packages Timesheets MTS or Timesheets Lite for the next day.

2. Prioritize the tasks by deciding which are the highest value added tasks you can do. You can do this by asking yourself questions like, 'What is it on this list that I, and only I can do?', or 'why am I on the payroll here and which if these tasks am I best suited to address?'.

3. Be sure to make the distinction between what is 'urgent', and what is 'important'. An unexpected phone call may need to be dealt with 'urgently', but at what consequence to not completing an 'important' task.

4. To help determine how important as task is figure out the consequences of doing or not doing a task. Are there positive rewards to be gained from completing a task? Are there consequences of not completing a task?

5. Are your tasks just 'busy' work, or are they truly accomplishing something? This uses the the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 rule) which you can read about here. Basically the concept of this is that 80% of the results are accomplished with 20% of the effort. Are your tasks part of the 80% or the 20%? Obviously if part of the 20% then these should have a higher priority in your day.

Here's to finding more hours in the day!

Mark Nemtsas
Moving Target Software
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