KEY POINTS:
When Deborah Wilson found herself with not one but two senior roles at shipping company Pacific Forum Line, she decided to become more efficient.
Wilson's existing role as commercial manager Cook Islands was demanding in its own right.
However, when the training quality control manager role was added to her responsibilities, she knew she needed to take action to get the maximum from both roles.
Pacific Forum Line was at the time contracting Roseann Gedye, who runs Roseann's Principles, to run a series of self-management courses and Wilson put herself on one.
Wilson says: "The rationale of [the course] it is ourselves we have to manage better, not just our time.
"The course taught me a lot of different techniques to manage the 24 hours in a day much better and reach your personal and professional goals."
Two key concepts helped Wilson squeeze an awful lot more out of her days.
The first was a matrix to prioritise tasks by assessing the level of importance on one axis and urgency of each on the other axis on a scale of one to five. "Now I do this in my mind with each job I have to do," she says.
The second concept called Top Payoff Activities taught Wilson to view each task in terms of what it cost financially, by breaking her salary down into minutes and hours.
"You soon realise the small, trivial things you have been doing and you question how much value there is in doing those tasks."
Many attendees at such courses fail to put the learning into action.
Wilson had to set a number of goals at the course and set time frames to implement them. Gedye followed up with checks and inspirational material to keep her charge on course.
The time was also right for Wilson, who says she now gets more done in fewer hours, spends greater time with her family (which she was sacrificing because of work commitments), does more exercise and has resumed a part-time degree at Massey University.
More importantly she's also less stressed, despite holding down two roles.
At work, Wilson has learned to prioritise and subsequently delegate tasks that can be done by others such as compiling flyers and handouts for staff and to hand more tasks to an agency in Rarotonga.
"Prioritising means that I am not always working in crisis. I only get involved when I need to now."
Why make yourself more efficient? Business costs are rising but prices aren't resulting in a huge squeeze to improve efficiency in the workplace, says Iain McCormick, director of the Executive Coaching Centre.
"If you want to get ahead in your career, you are going to need to find ways to do your job smarter all the time. That is the nub of the issue."
Improved efficiency can improve people's work-life balance.
Katheren Leitner, director of TrainingPlus, who runs time management workshops, says to be more efficient at work you must first step back and look at some of the basics.
"Be honest in answering the following question: what are you paid to do?" says Leitner.
"Would you pay yourself, given your daily input?"
Many employees have never thought of time as something they can manage, says Leitner .
Debbie Mayo-Smith, international internet and marketing guru and author of 101 Quick Tips for Email and Google, estimates that the average employee wastes one to two hours a day because of inefficient use of email and a lack of setting up rules.
Efficiency fast forwards career
By Bob Laws
Personnel manager Bob Laws believes he's fast-forwarded his career 10 years thanks to the simple decision to make himself more efficient.
Laws, who was part of the set-up team of New World's Te Rapa store, realised that the supermarket branch was failing to meet staff targets for engagement, productivity and absenteeism.
"I sat down and did a personal self-analysis as to where we were falling through the cracks.
"I looked at why things weren't getting done when they were supposed to. Unfortunately, it turned out a lot of it rested with me. I realised I had to strategise better and keep to a timetable."
Instead of taking courses, Laws taught himself to be more efficient by reading management books.
Those that worked best for him were The Success System That Never Fails, by W. Clement Stone, The One Minute Manager by Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
With a dramatic cut in his own wastage of time and with new strategising skills under his belt, Laws set up life skills programmes for staff and instituted new ways of working that have seen absenteeism and turnover fall substantially.
What's more, New World Te Rapa became the first supermarket in New Zealand to make the finals of the Unlimited/JRA Best Places to Work Survey - voted by staff.
It also won the supermarket section of the Waikato Top Shop awards.
Laws now does internal consultancy for New World and has trained the managers at its Hillcrest store which opened on Tuesday.
Top 10 tips to be more efficient
1. Start time logging.
Set up a simple time log of everything you do in a typical working day to the nearest minute if possible. It's important to include interruptions and breaks in the log. At the end of each week for a month, highlight everything that wasn't planned and consider ways to cut out the unnecessary tasks or interruptions.
2. Prioritise.
People who don't manage their time well often can't work out the difference between urgent and important, says Leitner, who cites the case of a group of executives who she created a template for which allowed them to prioritise their time according to what was most important to their business performance measures.
3. Delegate or ditch.
Take a look at your time log and prioritisation template and consider what can be delegated.
4. Create systems and task lists.
TrainingPlus' Katheren Leitner says: "Be clear on the tasks for each day. Create a checklist and stay focused on this." If you're not achieving what's in your task list, try scheduling and protecting activities - take your task list and a day planner and schedule what you will be doing in that time.
5. Compartmentalise.
Take the tasks at hand and split them into separate groups, clusters or compartments. Create a schedule and work only on the compartment at hand.
6. Multi-task.
Compartmentalising doesn't mean that multi-tasking doesn't work. internet guru Debbie Mayo-Smith, a mother of six, had to become supremely efficient to keep her business and home running. Whenever she takes her children to soccer practice, she spends her time walking around the field and listens to motivational and other business-related pod casts as she walks. That way she's doing parenting, exercise and education all at the same time.
7. Work with a buddy.
Working with a colleague to keep each other honest or getting a mentor is a lot more likely to result in met goals. Meet with that person daily or weekly to discuss your efficiency and review your time management log, task lists and schedule.
8. Take control of email.
Mayo-Smith says the typical desk-based employee wastes about $3000 a year thanks simply to their inability to conquer email. Her number one tip is to use Rules to manage your inbox. If you are often sent cc'd emails, then have them automatically filed in a folder to be looked at later - leaving only important email in your inbox. Another great time saver is signatures, which are chunks of text that can be dropped into an email such as "thank you XXX for referring XXX to my newsletter. I appreciate how busy people are", which Mayo-Smith inserts each time someone is referred to her.
Other key Outlook email tips:
* Set up Tasks to remind you automatically of jobs.
* Learn to drag and drop information.
* Set up Categories in your contact book.
* Use Mail Merge to send the same information to many people from your contacts book.
Another key tip from time management experts is to disable the automatic notifier that you have email.
Leitner says: "Each time you break your concentration, you will waste five to 15 minutes ... refocusing."
Mayo-Smith says people need to beware of devices such as the BlackBerry that constantly deliver email to you, breaking concentration.
9. Change your self image.
If you believe you are inefficient, you will be. Visualising yourself as someone who gets tasks done efficiently will help you act that way.
10. Take regular breaks.
"Regardless of your IQ score, the brain can maintain full concentration for between 90 and 120 minutes. After this time, concentration becomes difficult and you will notice mistakes creeping in, double handling occurring and a general lack of concentration," says Leitner.
