Organise your time at work

One of the paramount attributes of successful people is that they are well organised. Even at work, you need to be very organised if you are to have a successful career. How do you organise your time at work? Do you spend time organising your actions? Do you organise the schedule of your work for the day, week and month? How do you make sure that you do not lose track of your actions?

If you do not organise your time at work, your output will not optimised. You will basically achieve much less than you can potentially achieve with some organisation of your time and work. I had a manager who spent a lot of time reading about techniques and methodologies of managing his time and work. Within three years, he got a much bigger job as director in a bank. His drive to continuously improve on how he organised his time and work was one of the key attributes for his amazing career growth. You too can grow your career to levels you desire by organising your time at work.

I have a Ugandan friend who works as a senior IT projects manager at Shell Oil in the Netherlands, Dr Stephen Otim, who is very particular on organising his time and work. Every day in the morning, he spends some 15 minutes or so planning his whole day-reviewing his diary, arranging meetings and rescheduling some actions and so forth. In the evening also, just before leaving the office, he spends some 15 to 30 minutes organising his time and work for the next day.

I know another director at some successful company. She rose to director level very young. One of her biggest strengths is that she is great at organising her time and work at work. Her diary is the best companion she has at work. Every morning she lists all her actions. As the day goes by, she makes sure she crosses out all actions that are done and completed. At the end of the day, she transfers all the uncompleted actions to the next day in her diary, as a starting schedule for the next day. This way, she comes out as an organised professional that does what she says and as one who is effective because she gets things done.

Some people go to the extent of using technology to organise their time and work. We do know that in managing projects, there are tools like Microsoft Project and others that one can use to manage projects, thereby coming out organised in projects. But I also know a couple of people who have acquired technology tools that they use to manage their time. For our purposes here, this goes to underscore how important it is to organise your time at work. Whether you do it manually or use technology is down to choice and preference. The common essence of the matter remains that you need to organise your time at work in order to be efficient and effective and in order to have a progressively successful career.

From the examples of some of the successful career professionals above, we learn very clearly that organising one’s time at work is very important. Therefore, you too need to spend your time organising your time at work. Every morning, spend some time to organise your time for the day. Even throughout the day, keep checking your diary and schedule of actions and meetings. Then, at the end of the day, review what you had planned for the day, marking out what has been done, closed and completed and indicating what needs to be carried forward to the next day. This way, you too will be well organised and you stand a good chance of becoming very successful in your career. Good luck! n