Learning to manage your time effectively

Effective time management is important for a manger to do his/her job. If you do not properly manage your time, you can find yourself missing deadlines, forgetting meetings, and double booking yourself.

If you don't already use a calendar to help you manage your time, you should get one. Online calendars are a great way to keep you on schedule as most of them have automatic alerts that are sent out before an appointment so you do not forget it. The other nice thing about online calendars is that you can sync them with your cell phones and PDA's, devices that every manager needs to have in today's busy world.

Hiring a personal assistant to help you manage your time is a wise decision. Assistants can do all of the grunt work that is taking up too much of your precious work time. Answering emails can take several hours and more than half of those emails are not relevant to the day-to-day activities of your job. Hiring an assistant to screen those emails and to respond to the simple questions will allow you to get to the emails that are truly pressing.

Keep your meetings short will allow you to have more free time to manage all of the different job responsibilities you have. Write up an agenda for your meetings so you can keep everyone on task. Without an agenda some people may start to elaborate about certain things and before you know it the meeting has been going on for over an hour when it was only scheduled for 20 minutes. Your assistant should be in charge of writing up a meeting agenda and handing it out to all of the meeting attendees before the meeting so they can come prepared with all of the documents they need for the meeting.

To effectively manage your time, you need to take a few time outs to relax and de-stress yourself. Managers have a large responsibility and it can be easy to become overwhelmed and stressed. Taking time to practice daily deep breathing is a great way to just relax and refocus on your job. It also makes you a more pleasant individual to be around, allow your employees to appreciate the time they spend working with you.

Set reasonable deadlines for yourself. It can be easy to get overwhelmed when you set deadlines that you can never meet. Allow yourself an extra day or two or a week or more when you set a deadline because you never know what type of setbacks will happen that can cause you to miss a deadline. Set up calendar alerts to let you know when a deadline is getting close. This will provide you with a bit of extra time to hurry up and work on the project and make the last few changes that you need before the deadline has arrived.

Watch your time and be weary of wasting too much time. Talking to your employees and laughing for a few minutes is a great way to bond with them but if you catch yourself doing it too often it can be a big waste of time. When this happens, you will end up in over your head and you won't have the time to finish other projects. Stress also occurs because of this and it can cause you to have a hard time with your job.

To help you learn how to manage your time, you also need to learn how to delegate some of your job responsibilities. You need to learn how to depend upon others to take some of the burden off your shoulders.