Effective Time Management Tips to Help Manage your Task Lists - and Your Career

Do you find yourself bogged down by your inbox? Is your to-do list never ending? Are deadlines causing you undue stress and affecting your life outside of work?


Many of us can feel under the gun in our jobs, and of course a little bit of stress can be a good motivational factor to get us working at our full potential. The stress levels become a concern when they start to inhibit your productivity and ability to perform.


Professional business training courses offer a number of workshops and tips to help individuals manage their time more effectively and enable a more positive mindset about their performance. Here are some practical tips:


- Plan and organise - even if you're short on time, you need to set aside some time to effectively plan and manage your tasks so that you can tackle them in a productive manner. Spend a few minutes at the start of the morning organising your day - a to-do list can be especially helpful.

- Prioritise - everything always needs to be done now, ASAP and addressed urgently - that's the nature of the beast. You will still have to prioritise your tasks in order to make some sense of your tasks and jobs. Be sure to clearly communicate your priorities to stakeholders and interested parties so that they have realistic expectations and can adjust their timelines accordingly.

- Understand urgent vs important - a trick that many career coaches suggest is to eliminate urgent tasks from your to-do list, perhaps finding a way to delegate them to another colleague. Urgent tasks usually have short term effects and can ultimately be a distraction from the project's greater focus and goals. Put "important" tasks that will have longer term effects ahead of those listed as urgent.

- Work with your own biorhythms - are you a morning person or do you peak in the afternoon? Understanding your own natural biorhythms can help you allocate tasks in a way that is more efficient and productive. If you're mentally exhausted by 4:00 pm, there's very little that will be learned at a sales training workshop at this time.


Effective workers know that sometimes the most important way to manage time is to learn to say "no" - but communicating this effectively is an important skill to develop. For executives that feel they're constantly being pulled in different directions, effective executive coaching from resources like www.rogesi.com can help you find balance and prioritise the demands placed on them so that they can continue to be effective leaders within their organisation.


By becoming more self aware of your own abilities and how you work most productively, you'll be able to manage your work in a way that's healthy and efficient. Managers can help their teams by investing in ">leadership skills for your employees.