Time Management Tip: Communication Costing You Time?

This time management tip is about the importance of communication in your efforts to be more efficient with your time. Communication always involves at least two parties, and the more people involved the more likely communication problems will cost you time. As with any good plan you have to start right to end right, and it’s no different with communication.

Good upfront communication improves time management and lessens frustration. Before starting on any project clarify the expected results, and get agreement on both the results and the time line. In most cases any two people don’t have to take the exact approach to get the same result. It’s the result that’s important not the details of how. Setting time lines up front establishes mutually agreed upon time frames so no one feels let down later.

Tracking and measuring saves time and improves your time management. Establish the measurements that will be used by everyone involved to measure progress, and set a date and time for follow-up. Measurements and follow-up dates won’t prevent things from going wrong, but it will prevent them from getting ignored until it’s too late to correct things and get things back on track.

Communication provides an opportunity for you to learn things that will further improve your time management effectiveness. At the agreed upon date and time follow-up and get feedback. From the feedback you will learn about any problems or short falls, and you will learn information that will be useful if you ever have to do this again. Feedback is really important on several different levels. Through feedback you will learn how to effectively communicate with the other person, how to improve the system, what you’ve overlooked, and how to make the project efficiently repeatable if it needs to be.

You may have thought that time management tips were just personal pointers, but as you can see time management tips often extend to your interaction with others. You don’t usually get behind all on your own, so you need to learn how to help others to help you to stay on track. Communication with a few measurements and follow-up is a great way to improve your time management efforts.