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How can I evaluate my current Time Management?

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Posted by Your Guide on October 31, 2005 11:08 AM

In some cases, a person may be painfully aware of his/her poor time management. Other people may be wasting time right and left without any knowledge that they could manage their time differently. While evaluating time management is not an exact science, reflecting on some of these questions can help you examine your time management skills:


  • Do you feel and appear frazzled? If you consistently feel that you are playing catch-up, you could use some time management work. If you are always rushing from one responsibility to the next, you likely need some help in slowing down and managing your time. In addition, ask your family and co-workers if they think you are especially frazzled; they may recognize it long before you do.
  • How does your schedule/day-timer look? It’s not bad to have a full day, but if you have three meetings planned for the same time or if you can’t see a spot on your calendar because of everything written on it, you likely want to restructure your time management.
  • How do you handle long-term projects? If you seem to be consistently surprised by deadlines that you had forgotten about, the problem may not be your memory but rather your time management over the previous weeks and months.
  • Are your meetings and conferences productive? If you leave a meeting without a plan of action, you will likely have to meet again in the near future. If your conferences spend far more time on gossip than on the issue at hand, you are wasting valuable time.
  • Do you tend to over promise? Promising beyond what you can deliver is one of the main causes of stress and busyness. You may be promising that you can do something in which you have no experience or that you can complete a task sooner than is truly reasonable. Regardless, you end up in a lose/lose time management situation: you’re most likely not going to succeed but you’re going to overwhelm yourself trying.

It is worth the effort to take some time and evaluate your time management skills. Chances are, you have slipped into your current time management pattern over years of practice, but simply take note of where you are and how you can improve.



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