Priorities in Human Relations

The term time management refers to techniques designed to enable people to get more done in less time with better results. Time management skills will have a direct effect on your productivity and career success. The focus here is on improving your time management skills, as we can gain an hour a day. In this course, we examine ways to analyze your present use of time, a priority determination system, ways to use a time management system, and time management techniques.

The first step to successful time management is to determine current time use. People often do not realize how much time they waste until they analyze time use. Are you satisfied with how you spend yours? An analysis of how you use your time will indicate areas for improvement. The time log is a daily diary that tracks activities and enables a person to determine how time is used.

A priority is the preference given to one activity over other activities. There usually isn’t enough time to do everything, but there is time to do the most important things. Employees confessed to wasting about 40% of their time at work doing unimportant or downright irrelevant things.

Don’t confuse being busy doing lots of activities with making progress on the important priorities (objectives). Focus on your most important priorities (which are often fewer than you think), doing them well, and eliminating essentially everything else. So assign a priority to each task objective, and do the most important thing first (without unnecessary interruptions)—make it a rule. Try to get at least 90 minutes of uninterrupted time a day.

Tasks that you must get done should be placed on a to-do list and then prioritized, ranking the order of performance. According to Peter Drucker, a few people seem to do an incredible number of things; however, their impressive versatility is based mainly on doing one thing at a time. We all have the same 24 hours a day—so its all about how to use your time to manage important activities. Make a plan, and be sure to include prioritized objectives and schedule time to complete them.