Essential Skill: Time Management
As unfair as things can sometimes seem, we all get the same number of hours in a day. Some travel professionals, however, are better than others at using the time allotted. Balancing the workday with leisure time, personal life and family time is a prime objective for most travel professionals. People who learn to effectively manage their time are almost inevitably good at most aspects of their business life, functioning effectively even when the pressure is on. Fortunately, time management is a skill that can be learned.
It’s one thing to be busy, it’s another to be effective. People who have poor time management skills can be the hardest of workers. However, if you are working at the wrong thing, or spending your working hours churning projects rather than finishing them, you can spin your wheels rather than gaining any real traction. Deadlines get missed, projects collide with each other and stress levels rise. Being too busy is no fun. |
The secret to time management involves first analyzing how you are really spending your time and replacing bad habits with new ones. Taking on the right tasks in a prioritized order assists with bringing your work load into perspective and under control. Effective scheduling, setting goals and driving forward in a directed manner is a matter of intent. Just as important is scheduling in the non-work items, personal and family time. Finally, beating the dark monster in the closet, procrastination, is not as difficult as it seems once you have the proper perspective on how to best approach your workload, biting off manageable chunks of projects and completing them in a methodical manner.
The payoff for good time management skills is considerable. Projects completed on time, the most effective use of the time available to you and a more fulfilling and less stressful personal and professional life. The tips we provide this week will be ones that you can immediately put into action, so follow along and let us know if they work for you.
Keeping Track of Time
As a travel professional, your day is busy. You know time management is important. You try to be reasonably efficient and make an effort not to waste time. Each minute of every day seems filled, yet there is always more to do. You want your efforts at time management to make you more productive, not just a reshuffling of the order in which you accomplish your tasks. How to begin?
If you have ever gone on a diet, you know the first step is often to make a record of your eating habits. So too, we want to keep a journal of how we spend our time. A good activity journal will assist you in mapping out exactly how you use your time. You might be surprised to discover as much as an entire hour each day devoted to activities that don’t really contribute to productivity. That same hour can then be applied to getting work done or to personal or family activities. For many of us, an extra hour each day would be a real gift. A good activity journal might help us find that kind of spare time.
Start a journal on a clean sheet of paper each day for a couple of weeks. Record a quick note about your activities along with the time started, stopped and lapsed. Don’t leave anything out. There is the time reading email, opening snail mail, getting coffee, planning itineraries for clients, making and returning phone calls. Record everything. Yes, that includes browsing on Facebook or Instagram.
Now, at the end of each day, highlight the activities with different color markers. Perhaps blue for email activities, yellow for personal time like coffee breaks or talking with your co-workers. Next, assign each of those activities a number 1-5 with 1 being a very important activity that you must do and 5 being a low priority activity that did not contribute to productivity or which you might have delegated to another to accomplish for you.
Look at your time journal and take note of the following items:
1. Doing low priority items first. Prioritize your day. High priority items first when your energy levels are high. Low priority when you don’t feel like thinking, just needing to do mechanical things. A good example? If you are organizing your desk first thing in the morning, you are using a high energy time for a low priority item. Consider organizing your desk last thing each day in preparation for the next day. You will feel better greeted with a well organized work space first thing. Also, if you are truly a high energy person during the morning, consider starting a half hour early. Many people discover they get vast amounts accomplished before the phones begin ringing.
2. Doing low priority jobs you should delegate. If you work in an office, should you really be the one cleaning out the refrigerator, organizing brochures or other tasks that may well be the responsibility of others? If you work by yourself, are you doing household chores during your workday that should be someone else’s responsibility?
3. Distractions. Often we let our work tasks function more like distractions than focused activities. How many times a day do you check your email? Constantly through the day? At random times? Are you really marketing on Facebook or just browsing? Set fixed times for email and block out time for reading, responding and filtering junk. Don’t interrupt other important activities for activities with no or low return. Stay on track, one job at a time. Juggling tasks during the day is not as productive. Minimize the number of times during the day that you switch focus.
4. Take short breaks between tasks. Reward yourself with coffee, talks with friends or a walk outside. But limit those activities to 10 minutes then get back on track to the next focused task. Limiting is important or you will suddenly find that cup of coffee costs you a full half hour or that you have been daydreaming and browsing the internet for 15 minutes, neither working nor really relaxing.
5. Very Low Priority items. Look at the low-priority, or no-priority time you spend during each day. Is it possible to group those items together into a once a day or, better, once a week activity?
A good activity journal will help you better understand how you are currently using your time and how you can better organize your day. That’s a good time management first step.
Your To-Do List
The payoff for good time management skills is considerable. Projects completed on time, the most effective use of the time available to you and a more fulfilling and less stressful personal and professional life. The tips we provide this week will be ones that you can immediately put into action, so follow along and let us know if they work for you.
Keeping Track of Time
As a travel professional, your day is busy. You know time management is important. You try to be reasonably efficient and make an effort not to waste time. Each minute of every day seems filled, yet there is always more to do. You want your efforts at time management to make you more productive, not just a reshuffling of the order in which you accomplish your tasks. How to begin?
If you have ever gone on a diet, you know the first step is often to make a record of your eating habits. So too, we want to keep a journal of how we spend our time. A good activity journal will assist you in mapping out exactly how you use your time. You might be surprised to discover as much as an entire hour each day devoted to activities that don’t really contribute to productivity. That same hour can then be applied to getting work done or to personal or family activities. For many of us, an extra hour each day would be a real gift. A good activity journal might help us find that kind of spare time.
Start a journal on a clean sheet of paper each day for a couple of weeks. Record a quick note about your activities along with the time started, stopped and lapsed. Don’t leave anything out. There is the time reading email, opening snail mail, getting coffee, planning itineraries for clients, making and returning phone calls. Record everything. Yes, that includes browsing on Facebook or Instagram.
Now, at the end of each day, highlight the activities with different color markers. Perhaps blue for email activities, yellow for personal time like coffee breaks or talking with your co-workers. Next, assign each of those activities a number 1-5 with 1 being a very important activity that you must do and 5 being a low priority activity that did not contribute to productivity or which you might have delegated to another to accomplish for you.
Look at your time journal and take note of the following items:
1. Doing low priority items first. Prioritize your day. High priority items first when your energy levels are high. Low priority when you don’t feel like thinking, just needing to do mechanical things. A good example? If you are organizing your desk first thing in the morning, you are using a high energy time for a low priority item. Consider organizing your desk last thing each day in preparation for the next day. You will feel better greeted with a well organized work space first thing. Also, if you are truly a high energy person during the morning, consider starting a half hour early. Many people discover they get vast amounts accomplished before the phones begin ringing.
2. Doing low priority jobs you should delegate. If you work in an office, should you really be the one cleaning out the refrigerator, organizing brochures or other tasks that may well be the responsibility of others? If you work by yourself, are you doing household chores during your workday that should be someone else’s responsibility?
3. Distractions. Often we let our work tasks function more like distractions than focused activities. How many times a day do you check your email? Constantly through the day? At random times? Are you really marketing on Facebook or just browsing? Set fixed times for email and block out time for reading, responding and filtering junk. Don’t interrupt other important activities for activities with no or low return. Stay on track, one job at a time. Juggling tasks during the day is not as productive. Minimize the number of times during the day that you switch focus.
4. Take short breaks between tasks. Reward yourself with coffee, talks with friends or a walk outside. But limit those activities to 10 minutes then get back on track to the next focused task. Limiting is important or you will suddenly find that cup of coffee costs you a full half hour or that you have been daydreaming and browsing the internet for 15 minutes, neither working nor really relaxing.
5. Very Low Priority items. Look at the low-priority, or no-priority time you spend during each day. Is it possible to group those items together into a once a day or, better, once a week activity?
A good activity journal will help you better understand how you are currently using your time and how you can better organize your day. That’s a good time management first step.
Your To-Do List
The best single time management tool is a to-do list. It is a simple but powerful tool, easy to understand and maintain. In one place all of the jobs you have to do, lined up and waiting action, prioritized in order of importance. Well, in theory that is how a to-do list should operate. In reality, we all tend to use our to-do lists in a hit or miss fashion. Yet, we also know how effective a well maintained to-do list can be – so perhaps a short review of how to keep one is in order.
A good to-do list assists you to remember all of the tasks you have at hand. When under pressure, we tend to focus on a few items at the expense of others and may actually forget important jobs. A to-do lists allows us to tackle important tasks first, without losing track of the need to complete other items. The to-do lists also functions as an activity journal – an important tool helping to determine how wisely you are spending your time. |
Time management guru David Allen in 2002 authored the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. It’s still a good read and I recommend it to each one of you that feels a bit overwhelmed at work. Allen’s time management method is simple and intuitive: get those “things to do” out of your head and record them in some reliable fashion externally. Then you can concentrate on actually doing what needs to be done rather than on remembering what needs to be done.
From my own reading, Allen’s most important tip is equally simple. Don’t write your “To Do’s” as a simple description of the task, include the action you must take. For example “Make Dr. Appointment” becomes “Call Dr. Mendoza 850-566-5555.”
The most efficient people I have ever known all maintained to-do lists. Some kept their list on a sheet of paper, some in a day-planner and others electronically. Many kept a running journal, transferring unfinished lists each day to a new entry. In every case, however, the list was an actual list – written down, prioritized and completed tasks noted. Some of the most fastidious to-do list masters would even complete a task not on the list, write it down after completion and then immediately scratch it out. The effect was psychological (one more accomplishment) and also had the effect of creating a journal of when a task was accomplished.
Begin by writing down all of the tasks you have in front of you. Make the items you list specific action items. If some tasks are very large, break them down into smaller units. For example “plan a cruise night” is not as specific as “Find rental space” and “gather invitation list”. Place a completion date next to each task. Now, prioritize your list from 1-5 with 1 being the most important and 5 the least. Re-write the list in priority order. Important tasks that are not due immediately might deserve some additional consideration – doing a small amount of research or study now can take the task down to size closer to its due date. If your list is too long, break it up into immediate tasks and those that are due much later. A to-do list that overwhelms you will not be as good a friend as one that assist you in getting work completed.
Focus on a task, finish it and scratch it off the list. Move to the next priority. The very act of maintaining a list and scratching an item off as completed will often bring a feeling of being in control of your time.
Scheduling
From my own reading, Allen’s most important tip is equally simple. Don’t write your “To Do’s” as a simple description of the task, include the action you must take. For example “Make Dr. Appointment” becomes “Call Dr. Mendoza 850-566-5555.”
The most efficient people I have ever known all maintained to-do lists. Some kept their list on a sheet of paper, some in a day-planner and others electronically. Many kept a running journal, transferring unfinished lists each day to a new entry. In every case, however, the list was an actual list – written down, prioritized and completed tasks noted. Some of the most fastidious to-do list masters would even complete a task not on the list, write it down after completion and then immediately scratch it out. The effect was psychological (one more accomplishment) and also had the effect of creating a journal of when a task was accomplished.
Begin by writing down all of the tasks you have in front of you. Make the items you list specific action items. If some tasks are very large, break them down into smaller units. For example “plan a cruise night” is not as specific as “Find rental space” and “gather invitation list”. Place a completion date next to each task. Now, prioritize your list from 1-5 with 1 being the most important and 5 the least. Re-write the list in priority order. Important tasks that are not due immediately might deserve some additional consideration – doing a small amount of research or study now can take the task down to size closer to its due date. If your list is too long, break it up into immediate tasks and those that are due much later. A to-do list that overwhelms you will not be as good a friend as one that assist you in getting work completed.
Focus on a task, finish it and scratch it off the list. Move to the next priority. The very act of maintaining a list and scratching an item off as completed will often bring a feeling of being in control of your time.
Scheduling
What does effective time management have to do with marketing? It is a well known syndrome that travel professionals, like other business people, often spend so much time involved in the day to day operations of their business that they spend far too little time actually thinking about their business. When schedules fill up, when there is no time left for planning and evaluation, business starts to flat line. Without effective time management skill, the travel agent has no time to think about their marketing plan or to evaluate the success of marketing efforts. Promotion of the business begins to take a back seat to running the business, marketing happens sporadically and in bursts rather than as part of a well-executed plan. Effective time management ensures that the time is available for marketing to get its appropriate allocation.
|
Our mission is to determine how to block out time in every day/week/month to accomplish the items on the to-do list as well as the unexpected and the non-itemized demands on your time that are part of being a travel consultant. Here again, there are great tools available to assist you in your scheduling efforts – day planners, online calendars, apps, and tools like Outlook. I’m a Mac user and I depend heavily on iCal and Reminders which sync between my desktop, laptop and iPhone. Find a tool that you are comfortable using, and discipline yourself to its use. Most of us tend to use such tools sporadically rather than fully and systematically. The more dedicated we are to whatever time management aids we adopt, the more successful our time management skills will be.
Begin by outlining the largest blocks of time – probably your work day. Next, identify those tasks that you do every day, but which are routine enough that you probably do not list them in your to-do list – returning phone calls, filing, reading and answering email, meeting with clients, travel research and planning itineraries, office meetings. Block out those times on your calendar and try to do the same things at the same time each day/week/month. In other words, set aside a time for reading and answering email, perhaps a couple of times a day. Then, focus on that one task during the scheduled time. Set aside your preferred time to meet with clients – then schedule all of your client meetings, to the extent possible, within the allotted time. While it will be necessary from time to time, even frequently, to adjust your schedule to accommodate a client or some other unexpected event, by blocking out times for specific tasks you can focus, bringing all of your attention to bear on the job at hand.
Be sure to block out time for the unexpected. Group your blocks of time with 10 to 15 minutes between tasks not only for contingencies, but also for a personal break – time to get up, stretch, walk – to refresh yourself. You will return to your desk in better shape to hit the next time allocation. On a regular basis, work your to-do list into your schedule. Fit each item into its appropriate time allocation.
Finally, schedule 5 – 10 minutes at the end of each day to clear your desk and organize the next day. You will thank yourself the following morning.
Procrastination
Begin by outlining the largest blocks of time – probably your work day. Next, identify those tasks that you do every day, but which are routine enough that you probably do not list them in your to-do list – returning phone calls, filing, reading and answering email, meeting with clients, travel research and planning itineraries, office meetings. Block out those times on your calendar and try to do the same things at the same time each day/week/month. In other words, set aside a time for reading and answering email, perhaps a couple of times a day. Then, focus on that one task during the scheduled time. Set aside your preferred time to meet with clients – then schedule all of your client meetings, to the extent possible, within the allotted time. While it will be necessary from time to time, even frequently, to adjust your schedule to accommodate a client or some other unexpected event, by blocking out times for specific tasks you can focus, bringing all of your attention to bear on the job at hand.
Be sure to block out time for the unexpected. Group your blocks of time with 10 to 15 minutes between tasks not only for contingencies, but also for a personal break – time to get up, stretch, walk – to refresh yourself. You will return to your desk in better shape to hit the next time allocation. On a regular basis, work your to-do list into your schedule. Fit each item into its appropriate time allocation.
Finally, schedule 5 – 10 minutes at the end of each day to clear your desk and organize the next day. You will thank yourself the following morning.
Procrastination
Though not one of the 7 deadly sins, procrastination has to have made it pretty high on the list. Travel professionals who procrastinate know the mounting sense of foreboding that it creates – the feeling of impending crisis. Most of us who procrastinate are expert at coming up with reasons for our actions, and almost all of us are certain that we “work best under pressure.” It is a self-fulfilling prophecy – wait long enough to accomplish a task and there will be plenty of pressure to go around. The key to overcoming procrastination is to recognize it when it is occurring, to affirmatively work through the reasons not to procrastinate and then to move into action on the task.
|
Why do we procrastinate? Psychologists will tell you there are a number of reasons, some simple, some complex. Typically, we just don’t like the task at hand, so we make excuses to do something else. I, personally, do not like accounting. So when it’s time to do the books, I tell myself there is plenty of time to get it done, or that I really need to write an article instead. The accounting doesn’t go away, however. It continues to lurk just outside the conscious mind, playing havoc with my sense of accomplishment and well-being.
The secret to beating procrastination is to call to mind the negative consequences it creates. Procrastination means we will not do as good a job as we might otherwise. Procrastination means we don’t feel as good about ourselves for days or even longer as the task hangs over our head.
Procrastination means those who depend on us for results may be disappointed with our work product. Bottom line, procrastination is not a good thing – it assaults our integrity and we need to overcome the habit. For those Jungians among you – procrastination is a bit “shadowy,” a sly form of self-sabotage.
Recognize procrastination when it happens. Watch for the types of activity that denote procrastination in your work habits – putting low priority tasks first, re-reading old emails or files that have no priority, transferring the same item from day to day on your to-do list as it marches closer and closer to its due date. Acknowledge that the task at hand is not a favorite but it must be done. Put it on your to do list and then schedule it. Make an appointment to get the job done, then keep the appointment. Break it up into smaller tasks if necessary, and then accomplish some portion on a regular basis until it is completed. Reward yourself for completing each portion with a break from your desk, a cup of coffee or, better yet, with just feeling better about yourself for accomplishing a less-favored chore.
While procrastination is the subject of a lot of jokes, it is in reality a real impediment to good work habits and performance. Spend some time freeing yourself from the tyranny of procrastination and you will feel better about yourself. Don’t put it off. Really. Get started. Now!
The secret to beating procrastination is to call to mind the negative consequences it creates. Procrastination means we will not do as good a job as we might otherwise. Procrastination means we don’t feel as good about ourselves for days or even longer as the task hangs over our head.
Procrastination means those who depend on us for results may be disappointed with our work product. Bottom line, procrastination is not a good thing – it assaults our integrity and we need to overcome the habit. For those Jungians among you – procrastination is a bit “shadowy,” a sly form of self-sabotage.
Recognize procrastination when it happens. Watch for the types of activity that denote procrastination in your work habits – putting low priority tasks first, re-reading old emails or files that have no priority, transferring the same item from day to day on your to-do list as it marches closer and closer to its due date. Acknowledge that the task at hand is not a favorite but it must be done. Put it on your to do list and then schedule it. Make an appointment to get the job done, then keep the appointment. Break it up into smaller tasks if necessary, and then accomplish some portion on a regular basis until it is completed. Reward yourself for completing each portion with a break from your desk, a cup of coffee or, better yet, with just feeling better about yourself for accomplishing a less-favored chore.
While procrastination is the subject of a lot of jokes, it is in reality a real impediment to good work habits and performance. Spend some time freeing yourself from the tyranny of procrastination and you will feel better about yourself. Don’t put it off. Really. Get started. Now!