Chapter 1 - Introduction

Welcome to your Time Management: Become A Better Manager Of Time online course. This course is designed to give you quick tips, techniques and strategies to help you become better at what you do.

We’ve designed this as a practical guide and included things that we feel will help you to learn quickly and easily.

Work through the whole course but go through it at the pace you feel comfortable with. You may decide to do it in one go or in stages. It’s all up to you.

Chapter 2 - What Is Time Management

We can’t control how much time we have so how can we manage it? We all have 60 seconds in a minute; 60 minutes in a hour; 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year.

What we can manage are the decisions we make and what we do in the time we have.

Ever wanted more time? You may have said to yourself in the past when facing a deadline or having to work late ‘If only I had another hour today’. Well, what if your dreams came true - a recent on-line survey asked people to state what they would do if they had 25 hours in a day. Only 7% said they would spend it at work!! Most said they’d spend it in bed SLEEPING. I thing you’d agree - a great decision.

The decisions we make should be aligned with our VALUE. We all have a value. At work it’s what you do, be it administration, sales, finance, operations, warehousing, management etc. If we produce less than we are paid, we are not valuable to the organisation and we may find ourselves out of a job. We have a basic work value by what we are paid for and take home. If we waste time at work and are working later hours than we should, we are effectively giving ourselves a pay cut (if we don’t get paid overtime). If your boss said that your pay was to be cut you’d protest but do we effectively give ourselves a pay cut by not working to our true value?

Value isn’t just about work - we all have a personal value that essentially makes up the rest of your life - our ME time. Time spent with friends and family, social, spiritual, leisure time, etc. If we are working late every night and are constantly stressed we are not enjoying the things that make our lives valuable. So we should also call this Work and Life Values Management.

Our values at home and work should also be our PRIORITIES - these should be agreed, written down and acted upon on a regular basis. Our priorities are the core activities that ultimately make us successful. A review of college graduates in the US, twenty years after leaving university found out that the top 3% in terms of success were the ones that had a clear plan of priorities when they graduated and were still referring and refining these 20 years later.

You chose this guide because you want to learn more about how to manage your time, but what we should really be looking to manage are our time, decisions, life values, work value and priorities.. It’s not time but our use of the time we have that makes us effective time managers.

Chapter 3 - Quick Tips

There are thousands of tips and techniques for managing your time more effectively. Before we go into depth, however, to get you started, let’s examine some of the ‘time stealers’ we looked at earlier to see what stops you from achieving what you want each day. We’ll give you some simple ideas to help you on your way in the next few pages. 

Course Summary

• Be clear about what you wish to achieve when managing your time - set yourself clear and realistic objectives
• Remember that you’re not managing time - Your managing your priorities and your values and both of these will affect the decisions you make regarding your time
• Make a list of your time stealers - the things that stop you becoming time effective and set out a plan to overcome them
• Manage your self-talk so that you are committed and motivated to becoming a better time manager

Download and fill out the Post-Course Action Plan in the next page to help you become the best manager of time you can be.