Manage Your time, workload

With the year just a week old, many employers, employees and business people think they have all the time to accomplish 2016 target. But like a famous philosopher Charles Richards says; “don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.”

One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.
Balancing your extremely busy schedule is very vital in any environment. There is need to control how you spend your time in or out of work.

Why you need to manage time
The most important asset man has got is time and we are managers of our time.
“Managing your time helps cut out non-essential activities and enables you to achieve more at your workplace. You can easily enhance your career and get more out of it by accomplishing given workload in time,” says Ms Joan Asiimwe Tusubira, the programmes implementation manager, Building Tomorrow.
Ms Tusubira says with the tendencies of having a lot of workload beyond our capacity to accomplish, time management acts as a ‘stop clock’ that enables you to do what you can and leave out unnecessary workload that may not be crucial as well.

You will need to manage your time in order to beat deadlines.
“Most efficient and dependable workers often split their work load and allocate time to it. They will only take in what they can and accomplish it so that they beat deadlines,” she adds.
Mr Yasiin Magombe, a manager and consultant at Addie Consults Limited, indicates that balancing ones work time and workload is a question of planning. Effective planning gives us enough time to accomplish what we are tasked to do.

“We all have 24 hours a day but how we utilise it varies greatly. It’s unfortunate that some people are accustomed to utilising only eight or 12 hours of the day,” he says.
“Avoid the trap of piled workload and its associated negative implications, plan well for all your personal and office activities. Your plan will give you a clear schedule and actual time to allocate for each activity,” cautions Mr Magombe.

He says important to note though is the fact that proper time management is achieved through, personal discipline or schedule adherence, training on time management, experience, task commitment and learning the art of delegation. All these can be summed up into one great differentiator-attitude.

He adds that this is the reason as to why some employees performing similar tasks or roles will not complain of heavy workload, while others will.

How to manage time
Keep a record
You need to keep a dairy or notebook of the things you are meant to do.
“Some professions are complicated. You will need a dairy to keep and maintain a record of all you are supposed to do so that you can know how to spend your time, know what to do and when you should be doing it. This way, you will be able to avoid any unnecessary conversations and trips or journeys while at work,” highlights Ms Samalie Khainza, an advocate.

Get organised
It gets tricky when you are the disorganised. Completing workload will require a high level of organisation.
Mr Paul Wamboga, a health inspector says you will need to manage all the communications you make. Know who you should call and when.

“These communications should be made in such a way that you achieve what you want so that you do not have to postpone all the time,” he adds.

Delegate
It is said that there is no point in acting too busy, ants get busy too. The question should be what are you busy doing? In case you are doing lots of workload, which you are not sure of finishing, delegate.
Mr Wamboga advises that you assign some of your colleagues who you trust can accomplish the workload. It is pointless having lots of workload on your desk and you end up finishing none.

Learn to say No
There are a number of people who will be given or assigned a lot of workload by their bosses or employers and they will take it all even with the already unaccomplished workload on their desk. It is, therefore, important to be forthright and politely say no to excess workload especially when the deadlines are tight.
While workload may seem too much to accomplish in a given period of time, Mr Magombe says attitude towards work is essential in accomplishing any given workload. A positive attitude and passion towards work will make heavy workload seem lighter and doable.

Also, it is important to get to love what you do. Having passion for your career or the kind of work you do enables you to have the job description at your fingertips and key result areas well and be willing to go an extra mile always. With this at the forefront of your mind, no workload will seem heavy.

Priotise workload
“Noting down priorities is very important. On your list of things you are meant to be doing, tick or note those that are most important and urgent. You can name them one to 10 according to their urgency and importance. You will find that you do not need to do some things. Those should be cancelled out in the long-run if time doesn’t permit,”

Ms Samalie Khainza,
Advocate.

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