Top Tip for Time Management

Increasing your efficiency

As with many careers, one of the biggest challenges in recruitment is time management. Boring as it sounds, good time management can yield huge benefits like improved efficiency, process improvement, ability to meet deadlines or even set them appropriately!

The first thing to learn is that time is limited, there are only so many hours in a working day or any day for that matter. 

For several years now I have been ‘boxing’ out my diary. This means that in the morning or night before, I fill my day with colour coded calendar events (delivery, meetings, working on the company, business development etc).

By doing this, it is immediately apparent how limited time is and it forces me to prioritise tasks.

However, it is critical at this stage that you are honest with yourself; have you actually allocated enough time? It doesn’t matter how many boxes you cram in you still can’t manufacture more time! 

This method gives you a quick visual of how much time you’re allocating to certain tasks. If you have a lot of delivery work to do but your calendar is full of internal meetings it will quickly become apparent.

It is also really important that you retrospectively adjust boxes. For example, if you set an hour box to work on Project X but in reality it took you 2 hours, stretch that box and readjust/re-prioritise the rest of the boxes for the day. Just because you box out tasks, doesn’t mean you have to 100% stick to them if it means your quality levels will deplete.

The great thing about retrospectively adjusting your boxes is that at the end of the day/week/month you can look back and evaluate how your time was spent. From this you can seek to be more accurate with your future planning and/or seek efficiencies for tasks that take up too much of your time.

This is just one idea that I find is really helpful; how do you manage your time?