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In my department at the university there is a professor, who refuses to communicate with students via e-mail. He finds that it is to much time consuming especially in case of long discussion. For example, when a student writes to him and he replies the next day and then the student again replies on the following day then already 2 days have been spent. It would have been much easier if the student would have phoned him and the problem may have been solved in 5 or 10 minutes. Like he says: “I am not going to play this ping-pong game. ” He tells that students should phone him or step in to his office at the reception time instead of sending e-mail.

In Estonia, electronic communication is very widely used, probably to somewhat greater extent than in many other countries. The younger generation is especially keen on electronic communication such as sending e-mails. Therefore it is difficult for the students to get familiar to his communication preferences. Many students find him a lazy professor and complain that it is difficult to reach him. This issue has been a problem for the whole five years that I have been employed there. The communication rules have been discussed on many meetings and this professor has been told to changes him practices. But he has refused to do so. The head of the department changed over time, but no one of them has managed to get this professor to communicate via e-mail.

Why I am I telling this story? I am not going to talk about handling e-mails or efficient communication today. I am going to tell you how you can reduce the number of things to do easily.

The easiest way to get rid of a task is to make a decision of not doing it. The less you do the more time you have. At the same time you have to stick to your decision of abandoning the task. If you first think that you will abandon it, but when you start considering doing it later, then you are already wasting your time.

In many cases, we are afraid of declining the task we are expected to do. We are afraid about the consequences. If I decline a work task, then what will my boss think of me? We think that we may blow over chances for promotion or even get fired by not accepting the tasks. The same story goes with our personal commitments. If someone invites us to a coffee or party then we often think that we will insult the other party by turning down the invitation. So we end up accepting it even if we have more important things to do.

The result of not having courage to decline orders and invitations is that we do not have much control over our time. We end up doing what the other people tell us and when they tell us. But good time management involves control over our actions. If we want to do more things we want then we have to fewer things other people ask us to do.

But let’s come back to the story about this professor. Although he has continuously turned down orders to start using e-mail nothing bad has happened to him. He still has his position and good reputation. The same can apply to many other things that you are told to do. In many cases despite our fears nothing happens if we do not do a task we are given. What happens if you just do not respond to one questionnaire? Probably nothing will happen. What if you do turn down on invitation to have a beer in a bar? Probably your friends are not going to think anything bad about you, if they are your real friends they will understand that you have other things to do and will accept your decision. What will your boss say if you refuse to complete a report? If you are a good employee and if this report is not very important then it will not do any harm. Furthermore you could explain why it a time waste to work on that report and tell than you can use this time for working on an other more important task. In that way, you may earn respect from your boss.

Of course, you cannot ignore all the orders you are given and you cannot always say “no”. The point is that you have to prioritize the tasks. For example, some tasks are much more important for your company’s success than other. You should not skip doing these critical tasks, but you can turn down the other commitments, which have less importance.

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Every day we spend our time on different activities. For example our working time may include meetings, gathering information, writing documents, paying the bills, making phone calls and so on. We do not spend the whole day on one kind of tasks, but there are many different tasks to be done in one day. It means that we have to switch from one task to the next task many times in a day.

Many people tend to delay with starting the new task after they have completed the previous one. That kind of pauses will waste a considerable amount of time. For example if you delay the start of a new activity on the average by 5 minutes and there are 12 activities in your day then you will lose a whole hour. But there can be more tasks in your work day and some people waste even more time than 5 minutes before getting to the new tasks, so that kind of time loss can be even bigger.

That kind of procrastination is more likely to happen if the next task is unpleasant, difficult or time-consuming. If we do not like the idea that we have to start dealing with that task then we tend to wait until we begin with it. But procrastination will not make the things easier for us. We have to get started anyway and delaying just wastes time, which means that we get less things done in one day and it causes a threat of missing deadlines.

There are many ways of reducing procrastination. You will get started to new tasks faster if you apply the following tips:

• Motivate yourself. You have to know why you are going to perform the next task. Although it may be dull or unpleasant, but if you see that it is necessary for achieving success then it is easier to get to that task.
• Reward yourself. It is very difficult to be motivated and efficient if your life is only hard work. If you reward yourself with going to a movies or buying new shoes after successfully completing a project, then it is easier for you to motivate yourself.
• Make a plan. Think through how you are going to perform different tasks. Break them into smaller pieces. Think how you will start and finish the activity. What are the objectives? What is needed for getting a good result?
• Create time pressure. Plan your time and set end times for different activities. For each task plan time necessary to complete it, but avoid leaving to much time for a particular task. If there is a little time pressure then you are more likely to be productive and waste less time. If there is no time to waste with delaying the start, then you have to get going fast.
• Stay fresh. Low energy level causes procrastination. Make regular pauses in your work day for staying energized. During the pauses stand up from the table and do some physical exercises. Eat regularly and healthy. Avoid consuming too much fat. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Drink water to keep yourself hydrated and reduce your coffee intake. Have enough sleep in the night. Get to bed early and sleep for at least 7 hours a day.
• Create a “Start now!” habit. If you face a new task, then say “Start now!” to yourself. You may have to fight with your temptation to delay, but as soon as you get into new tasks you feel easy to keep going.

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Most of us are spending a considerable portion of their working time reading and writing e-mails. An average office worker spends 1-2 hours daily, dealing with email, which is up to 25% of working time. We may have tens or hundreds of emails waiting for us when we arrive in the office and it may take a lot of time to deal with them.

But what if we could handle our mail faster? We will have more time for other work tasks then and we could finish our day earlier. Following I will give you some tips how you can save time on e-mail communication:

• Decide when you read your e-mails. Having certain times during a day to read emails is a good time management practice. Checking e-mail twice a day is enough for most of us. The advantage of dealing with incoming mail on a certain time is that you will deal with a large number of mails together. In total, it will take you less time to read your mails in comparison of checking mail for every hour and dealing with only a small number of them at one time.
• Deal with one mail only once. You should open a message only one. After opening it read it through immediately (if is worth reading) and make a decision what are you going to with it. Are you going to reply to it, forward it to others, are there any actions to be taken by you? Make that decision at once.
• Learn to speed read. Speed reading techniques will enable you to work through you mail faster and you will save a lot of time.
• Send less mail out. Avoid sending mail when there is no need for it. In many cases making a phone call is more efficient than sending an e-mail. Before writing a mail ask yourself is it better to call or send mail on that occasion. Do not send jokes, videos and other funny stuff to other people. It wastes your and their time.
• Keep you messages short. Writing shorter messages will cost you less time, but you will also save the time of the recipient. Write a clear heading to the mail, so that it could be understood at once what the message is about. A good email starts we a call to action, it means that you tell at one what do you want to achieve with this mail, for example organize a meeting, send a report, ask for permission etc. Next, there should be the details of the issue in the middle part of the message, where you present the relevant information. Finally, the message should have a clear conclusion, where you summarize main points and repeat the call to action.
• Delete spam immediately. Do not waste your time on reading junk mail. Usually the mail program can send that kind of mail automatically to the spam folder and you should not waste time on reading these mails. Still, some times may happen that the spam filters send mails that you need to the spam folder. Therefore before deleting spam you should check the sender and title of these mails.
• Teach others to send you less mail. You are likely to receive 80% of mail from 20% of addresses, which belong to the people you work in close relations. If you tell them not to send unnecessary mail, then you can reduce the amount of your incoming mail.

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The easiest way to get rid of a task is drop it. If you do not perform a task then you will spend zero minutes on it. Decreasing the number of things you do will save you more time than doing things fast. For example, if you plan to read a book, which will take you 8 hours, then if you read it at fast pace then you may be able to complete it in 4 hours and you will save 4 hours. But if you decide not to read it then you will save 8 hours.

You have to accept that there is always more to do than you can. Every activity consumes time and time is a limited resource. Nobody can do everything. Even if you think that you are going to perform all your incoming tasks then you do not have time for it. You will not be able to finish some of them on time and probably you will never start dealing with some tasks.

There are many ways to eliminate tasks. Here I will give you some ideas for it:

• Decrease your information consumption. How many newspapers do you read? How many TV programs do you watch regularly? How many blogs to do you follow? Do you watch the same news programs from different TV channels and in addition read the same news from newspapers and web? Many people do so, but it costs them a lot of time. Cancel the subscriptions for the newspapers and magazines that you actually do not have time to read. Read fewer books, but select your reading material more carefully.
• Decrease you activities in voluntary organizations. How many voluntary events are you involved? How many clubs you are a member? How many committees are you nominated? What are the benefits to you from participating? You must be honest to yourself; you cannot participate in that kind of activities with out any limits.
• Decrease your communications. Can you decrease the number of phone calls you have to make by 20%? I think you can if you can sort out, which ones are the most useless ones. Probably you can e-mail these contacts.
• Decrease the number of events you participate. Although you may have heard a suggestion to participate in every possible seminar or conference for getting more contacts and educating yourself, you should still think for each event what kind of benefits do you get from it. Who are the participants? Why do you need contacts with them? Who are going to make presentations? What will they be talking about? How am I going to benefit from this knowledge? Attending these events consumes much time and you should have clear reasons for participating.
• Decrease your shopping. If you have taken your To-do-list seriously then there will be listed a number of things you should buy from different stores. Shopping is actually very time-consuming. Think, do you really want to buy all that stuff? Some of your desires will usually disappear over the time.

Following these principles helps me to save a lot of time. For example, I do not watch news programs from TV as I read them from the web. I have stopped actively participating in some organizations. For example, I used to attend CashFlow Clubs for some time with the hope of finding business partners, but it did not work out, so I am not attending their events any more. Some years ago I participated in many different kinds courses, now I tend to read more books instead as it saves time. And I do not like shopping.

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During our days we have to perform many different types of tasks. For some tasks you will deal with them only once during a day. For example, you may have only one board meeting in your day, one management training session to attend or one football practice. Still, many of our tasks are repetitive as we read and write a large number of emails, make several phone calls etc.

For repetitive tasks it is good idea to batch up them to blocks if you have control over the start and end times of them. In some cases you do not have that kind of a control as you cannot choose the start of every meeting, seminar or TV program. But if you are free to schedule that type of tasks then you should choose to deal with many similar types of activities in a sequence. For example, if you have to make 7 outgoing phone calls in a day and if you are free to make them on whatever time then it is useful do them one after another without dealing with any other tasks in between.

Switching from one task to the other tasks always takes some time and it decreases your productivity during the first minutes you deal with the next type of task. In case of phone calling very few of us will take the phone immediately after they have chosen to do so, but instead of that they will take a small brake. In some cases they will use it for rethinking the phone call, but often they will just procrastinate for several minutes. In a similar way after the end of the phone call it takes again time to get into the right mood for starting with the next task.

But if you are have already completed one phone call, then it is not so difficult to dial the next number without making a pause. It would be especially efficient if you have to make many similar types of calls, for example sales calls. Or if you have to ask opinion of inform several people about the same topic.

There are many situations in which you will benefit from performing tasks in blocks. For example if you have to process your emails then it is by far better than you deal with your mail couple of times a day instead of doing it every hour or in the worst case you will make a brake in your other activities every time you receive a new message.

If you have to clean and organize your office or home then do not do it for ten minutes a day. Take one hour or more for it. Doing it for 10 minutes will not lead you much of it being done and you distract yourself from other activities in that way.

In addition you may find that batching tasks into blocks is useful for

• Writing articles and blog posts. If your write several of them together it will take you less time then doing them separately. I usually write my blog posts for one week altogether. It saves me a lot of time.
• Gathering information. If you need to do some research then it will be useful to gather all the facts and data together before starting with the analysis. If you frequently switch between analysis and data gathering then it is difficult to get into the right working mood and you will be doing some of the analysis with not all the necessary data available for you. It could lead to wrong conclusions.
• Eating. It may seem strange to add it to this list, but in reality many people keep on eating constantly during entire day even if they are involved in other types of activities. For example, they are eating different types of snacks while working with their computer. Besides being unhealthy, it will decrease your productivity. So eat large enough meals 3 or 4 times a day and avoid frequent snacking between the meals.

Different types of tasks have to be done at different locations. It is wise to plan your time in a way that you will perform a number of activities in one location in a row instead of changing location frequently. Commuting is actually very time consuming and each time after we arrive in the next location it takes some time to find our working rhythm and reach full productivity. Therefore if you have to meet several people out of office, then you should schedule these meetings in a sequence so that you will not return your office between these meetings. If you are going to the shopping center to buy yourself new shoes you can batch it up with buying food products, visiting post office and a hairdresser.

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In the past, employees usually had strictly fixed working hours. In many cases they started their working days at 9 AM and finished at 5PM. During the last ten years the job have changed a lot and for many jobs the time you have to spend at the office is not strictly limited. For some jobs employees can work even at home. This is to a great extent caused by changes in the management culture. In today’s firms workers are lead more by assigning them broader projects and goals rather then detailed work tasks. Employees are given more control over their working process for motivating them. This has changed the nature of jobs and given the employees possibilities to do more what and when they want to do on their jobs. It may lead to better job performance and job satisfaction but at the same time it poses new challenges to the employees.

If you do not have strictly fixed working hours and you are working at home then you are away from your boss. The boss will not see what time do you start working in the morning, how long are your lunch breaks and how early do you finish. You are away from your co-workers and nobody will notice at once when you are shirking or not doing good quality work. If you have that type of job then you have to be your own supervisor and motivator, who has to guarantee that you put enough time and effort into your work in order to achieve your goals.

During the recent weeks I have been training sales consultants for an investment and insurance broker company. All the sales consultants have time and place flexible jobs. They do not receive any base salary and are paid only on commission. There are pretty good possibilities for earning nice money in that company as better sales consultants are earning about $25,000-$35,000 annually, whereas the average annual salary in Estonia is $12,000. However, most of the new sales consultants drop out during their first two months. I have been analyzing the reasons for that and found that on of the major causes for that is that these people are not ready for a time flexible job. Many of the new trainees are already in their forties and fifties, which means that they have spent several decades on regular jobs with fixed working hours.

When people are faced with that kind of new job conditions many of them cannot handle that situation. If you are lazy by your nature and there is no boss looking after you then you will tend to start late, make frequent pause and waste your working time. It will lead to poor work performance and low pay. After a couple of week many new sales consultants see that they are not suitable for that work and quit.

The previously listed problems, which the new consultants have in that firm, are related to their poor time management skills. Fortunately, these skills can be developed for everyone by specific training courses. On the general, these people need to possess free vital time management skills to be successful in their time flexible job:

• Goal setting. You have to know what you are pursing. How many sales do you want to achieve? What income do you desire? How to judge your abilities and set realistic targets?
• Planning. You have to make detailed plans for achieving your goals. Most often it means regular weekly and daily scheduling. Although your boss will not tell you how many hours you have to work, you should make that kind of choices on your own. How many clients you have to contact? How many sales presentations do you have to perform? How would you plan your daily work tasks?
• Working efficiently. You have to be motivated and organized in order to save your working time. You have to beat procrastination and keep yourself working the for extended time periods. You have to eliminate time wasting on chatting with friends, surfing internet or doing anything during your working time, which will not improve your work results.

These skills are vital for many other jobs too. The nature of work is continuously changing and the trend is that there will be more and more flexibility, which calls for better time management skills. Therefore it is time to start working on these skills.

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