Acquiring More Skills to Help with Time Management

An understanding of how to manage your time more effectively is easily achieved by the self-assessment of skills and ability. Being a confident communicator will help you convey your message, manage time and increase productivity.

Review and Revise

No matter how many skills you already possess, the skill of acquiring more time will not be one of them. This is because no matter how well-informed, confident, highly-skilled and knowledgeable you are nothing can instantly free up chunks of your day. Accepting this will enable you to look at this situation in a more creative way and will inspire you to utilise your time management skills to create a positive outcome.

Having confidence in your skills and ability enables you to explore opportunities to develop your knowledge further. Using time management as a guiding tool will help you create a working structure that incorporates many elements – communication, creation, delegation, completion – and allows you to review and revise as required. Successful time management will also identify opportunities to make changes, adapt or add more skills.

Checklist

Before increasing your skills it is important to correctly identify the skills you have already. Do you have the necessary skills required to perform your job to the best of your ability? Are there areas where you can increase or up-date your knowledge? Could your management of time be improved? Answering these questions honestly, and asking for performance feedback from others, will help you decide on your next action.

Skills Set

Learning how to be focused on the task in hand will identify your level of knowledge. Opting to acquire more skills, or fine tuning the ones you already have, can only be decided once you have accepted and understood the objectives of the task or project you will be working on. Personal time management however, involves more than list-making and delegation. It is about adding decision-making, critical thinking and emotional intelligence to the skills you employ in your work, and balancing this with the many tasks, jobs, chores and projects you encounter.

Time Table

The essence of time management is about getting good, positive results, and not just about saving time. It is also about solving problems with the minimum of fuss, and learning to be flexible in your working approach. Adding new skills to your CV will also be beneficial to you but it is worth taking your time deciding upon the best skills to adapt or increase.

Looking at a task from a different viewpoint may help you identify a fresh way of dealing with the task. It may also help you realise that you already possess the skills required to complete the task well. Breaking down a task into smaller chunks will allow you to work on solution finding or enable you to delegate parts of the job to other people with the relevant skills.

To-Do-List

• Review your performance and time management at frequent intervals.
• Identify the skills you already have, and the ones you will need to acquire.
• Take your time to view a task from a different perspective. This may help you find an instant solution.
• Adapt your skills accordingly or delegate a task to someone with the relevant skill level.
• Add any new skills you acquire to your CV.