Find the power of information right at your fingertips. KnowledgeDesk is a one stop nucleus for searching that vital piece of information, designed to make your search easier than ever before.
Keyword:
Category
Topic:
Previous  |   Random   | 
How to Manage Your Time
An important part of your day is how to organise yourself to make the best use of your time, equipment and resources available. The acquisition of self-organisation and time management skills marks the difference between the PA/secretary who is always in charge of herself and her job, always composed, calm and capable, and her disorganised counterpart, always stressed by imminent deadlines, behind with her workload and mostly driven by a series of lurches from one potential crisis to another.

Guidelines on Time Management and Self Organisation

Do:
  • Keep abreast: Acquire the habit of anticipating events and needs well ahead of their arrival.
  • Use diaries: Scan yours and your manager's diaries regularly and make time to plan what is needed for a coming interview, conference, visit etc.
  • Think logically: Develop a daily and weekly routine in which you tailor your tasks around your manager's needs and intermittent absences.
  • File and type: Save filing and routine, non-urgent typing for the two hours during which your manager is attending a meeting. Plan larger personal projects to coincide with your manager's “away days”.
  • Keep up to date: Keep an electronic or paper notebook of the various “work in progress” jobs that are delegated to you.
  • Reorder their priority (daily): according to the speed of approaching deadlines or your manager's ever changing sense of what is urgent.
  • Be consistent: Encourage your manager to work as far as possible according to a series of routines.
  • Set times for dictation and reviewing work schedules, signing cheques etc: This avoids last-minutes rushes and provides you with enough time to complete allocated work each day or week.
  • Be resourceful: Make a habit of scanning office and business systems magazines for labour- and time-saving devices and resources. Develop as helpful a set of equipment and material as possible. Avoid the trap of sticking to timeworn routines just because they are routines.
  • Use reminders: Keep your own bring-forward or memory-jogging diary of items for attention that occur on an infrequent or irregular cycle.
  • Keep up to date: Ensure you take the time and trouble to master the office equipment and systems available, and always be prepared to absorb a new technique.
Don't:
  • Be a Black Hole: Don't deny access to all from your manager. Ensure you act as a responsible communication with everyone in your network and you will find that an invaluable two-way process develops based on mutual trust between you and your colleagues.
  • Be reactive: Don't have a reactive approach to your job. Always adopt a proactive approach in which you anticipate jobs, problems and eventualities and plan and control events rather than letting them control you.
  • Waste time: Idle gossip is one of the biggest time wasters. If you're worth your salt you should be earning a good salary, with the emphasis on earn.
  • Waste your time on routine jobs you could easily delegate and monitor.
  • Betray your manager's confidences: Even to close friends. Most managers work under much stress and have virtually no one in whom to confide other than the secretary with whom a close professional relationship may develop. Many secretaries have shared their manager's promotional good fortune because they have proved entirely trustworthy.
  • Be afraid to disagree: If you think your manager is wrong, don't be shy of telling them – diplomatically of course. Good secretaries develop a much appreciated knack of sometimes saving managers from themselves and of proffering the benefit of another perspective upon a given problem. But don't be too upset if advice is ignored.
Previous  |   Random   | 

Share this page with your friends