Do you manage your time like an office worker or an office manager?

Most people know they could manage their time better, but even though they may have taken dozens of courses on the topic, they tend to stick to their old habits. When the pressure of work increases, they simply work faster and harder, often relying on over time to meet deadlines.

However, once you get promoted to a position where you now have to manage the office and other employees, your old way of coping will put you under impossible strain. Even if you do manage to get the work on time, you won’t have the satisfaction of improving the way that you, your team and the office function. Which is what is at the heart of good office management. 

The time management matrix is an important concept that every worker needs to understand and utilize in their work life. But when you are responsible for managing others, its importance increases exponentially.  

The first quadrant – the urgent and important tasks is often where we get stuck.  The pressure of daily deadlines eats up the day, and we believe it impossible to do more. Items in the second quadrant, those that are important but not urgent simply get delayed in the face of the next deadline. 

We often don’t tend to those important issues until the neglect of them has created some crisis which we can no longer ignore.

I often ask people on courses to write a sample to do list, their average week, much like a job description, so we can have a closer look at the content of their days. These lists hardly ever contain such items as delegating, training or coaching their staff, no planning time, no improvement projects, no team building, no visioning or big thinking or relationship building.  When I point this out, they tell me, ‘well we do those sometimes’. 

But the fact that they didn’t put them on their lists means they don’t really consider those things their main job. But as a manager, those things are your main job. They are the things that enable you to get more out of your time and from your team. But because the rewards of the long term don’t provide the instant satisfaction of a job complete now, we often put them aside. We blame lack of time but actually it is the lack of an adrenaline buzz that we get from instant action that is the real problem. Slow thoughtful focused action towards long term goals don’t appeal to our fast paced, over and done with instant gratification addiction.

However, in order to go ahead fast – you need to slow down and see where you are going first. 

A ‘to-do’ list is not enough. A ‘to-do list’ keeps you focused only on your daily goals, it doesn’t give you a longer sense of perspective. Its only when you plan ahead, looking forwards at the next month, 3 months or 6 months, that you can actually fix the time for those non-urgent but important activities to take place. 

For example, let’s say, you have a long-term project to improve the functioning of your office.   Over the next month, put aside slots in your calendar/diary of one hour, every second or third day, devoted to those long term aims. Things such, training a staff member to do a new job, restructuring the filing system, creating new systems, learning short cuts on your computer, solving a long-term problem or planning. If you don’t have an hour, half is still progress. Over the next months, those hours spent every week, though taking time from your busy day, will enable you to be more efficient over the long term, and actually create time. You also gain an incredible sense of accomplishment and peace of mind, knowing that you are not just doing your job, but you are adding value to the office through using your creativity, focus and self-discipline. By breaking up bigger improvements into small half hour steps completed over the weeks, you can stop feeling overwhelmed. 

Stephen Covey in his book First Things First, often referred to this way of planning your time, as getting the rocks in first. Referring to an analogy in which, if you have to fit rocks in a jar, as well as sand and water, you must put the rocks in first. Otherwise the jar will get filled up. 

In terms of time management, your rocks are those things you are likely to put off because they are complex, boring, or simply not as urgent as the item in front of you.  If you put them in the jar first, meaning, you must put them in your time scheduler, then all the sand and water generally fit into the available space left. 

The key in the beginning is to start with small steps, small commitments to these non-urgent but important tasks, and keeping them. As you begin to see the positive changes created by making time for these tasks, you will get more momentum and understanding of the principle to keep going. You become a time investor. Knowing that if you spend a little here now, you can save a lot later.

Managing your time with the mindset of an office manager is just one of dozens of in-depth topics we explore in our course The Effective Office Manager. If you want to take a step up in your confidence, clarity and capability as an office manager you can explore the dates and contents of our next course by clicking the link below:

https://aztechtraining.com/course/effective-office-management

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