21 Sep 3 Easy Ways To Your Manage Time Better

We’ve all been there. You start off the first day of your work week with a fresh cup of coffee…. or maybe two. Then you make your way into the office, where you pour yourself another cup of coffee, catch up on emails, listen to voicemails, and begin to make the mental list of everything needing to be done this week.

Now fast forward with me. It’s Friday, about 3:30 and no amount of coffee will bring back your motivation. At about this point, you realize how many important things never got done and you ask yourself,

“where did my week go?”

It’s not like you didn’t do anything. In fact, you can’t remember a busier week than this week. But why do you still have so much on your to-do list!!?

You see, as leaders it’s not enough to just get things done.

“If you want to be an effective leader you have to get the right things done.”

Being effective doesn’t just happen by having knowledge, skill, or passion. It’s knowing what the right things are and then investing that knowledge, skill, and passion into getting them done in the time you have.

So let’s talk about time. Time is by far the most valuable resource known to man. Unlike any other resource, if you lose it or waste it, you can never get it back. Doesn’t matter how high the demand is, the supply will never ever increase. For this reason, you have to respect and treasure your time.

Leaders who are effective don’t start their week by focusing on their tasks and to-do lists. They start with their time. But they also don’t just jump in with their weekly planner and begin to fill time slots either.

The first thing they do is pay attention to what they have been spending their time on.

You see, you can’t possibly determine how to best manage your time if you don’t even know where it goes in the first place.

Now, effective leaders choose to do this in multiple ways. Some leader choose to keep a time log in their office or on their phone so that they can easily record what tasks fill their days. Other leaders allow their secretaries or assistants to record this for them, but regardless of the method, effective leaders must have a log of where there time goes to.  Now this doesn’t have to be a 24 hour log for all 365 days of the year though. A lot of the time effective leaders dedicate 2 months twice a year to record what they are doing. That way they get an adequate picture of how they spend their time and can make necessary adjustment every 6 months. What’s most important is that you begin to see trends on where your time goes to.

The second thing that effective leaders do in order to manage their time is they begin identifying what things are wasting their time. They don’t assume that everything on their list is important or needs to be done. They look for time wasting areas in their work that can be eliminated in order to gain that time back. They typically ask themselves these three questions.

-What would happen if I didn’t do this at all? If the answer is nothing, eliminate it right away!

-What could be done by someone else just as well if not better?

-They ask their staff what am I doing to waste your time?

All three of these questions should produce time wasting tasks pretty quickly for you to eliminate or delegate to someone else. Now, once you have removed some of these time wasters, make sure to dive a little deeper and see what parts of your systems and processes are wasting a lot of time as well. Here are a couple more questions to ask:

-Is there a recurring crisis that is consumes a lot of my time. If you identify something, spend the extra time needed planning or equipping to make sure this crisis doesn’t keep coming back.

-Are we overstaffed to the point where I am consistently putting out fires or fighting to get decisions made?

-Is there an area where we are disorganized that often leads to either a crisis or adds more petty meetings.

-Is there a breakdown in the transfer of information from staff member to staff member or ministry to ministry that results in wasted time and confusion?

The third thing these leaders do is that they learn how to consolidate their time in order to be more effective. There is nothing that will waste more of your time when you are trying to accomplish important tasks then getting interrupted every 20 minutes. For this reason, effective leaders consolidate their time into large periods where they can focus on important tasks without being interrupted. Here are a couple of ideas on how you can do this.

-Limit all activities including meetings to the length of your attention span. Once you lose attention, you’ll get nothing done

-Schedule time consuming meetings all for the same day in order to free up time other days.

-Decide to work a couple hours or an entire day at home.

Now it’s also worth saying that people consume a lot more time than tasks do. And honestly, people are the biggest time wasters. Now as church leaders, we deal with people often and there is no way around interacting with them. That’s just ministry….but if you want to be an effective manager of your time, you must start valuing your time and limiting the number of time wasting conversations you get stuck in. Be available for when people who need you, but always have an end time for the conversation.

For ideas, check out our video on The Effective Executive.