Any new manager has to be able to use her or his time effectively. So personal time management is a key managerial skill. And the first important thing about that is to know what is important to fundamentally understand your job and to understand what it is that will make you successful in that job. For this, you need to read your job description carefully, and your terms of reference within your contract. But more important than that, need to speak to your boss and the senior people around you to understand what their priorities are. Because unless you know what it is that defines success for you, you won't be able to prioritize what's important.

The second thing is to be able effectively to distinguish between what's important and what is merely urgent. distinction between urgent and important gives us four types of task. At the bottom of the food chain are things that are neither urgent nor important things that are neither urgent nor important. You ought to be just dropping those. Because if you waste time on those, you're simply displacing that time from other meaningful, worthwhile activities. The next category are things that are urgent, but they're not important.

And these things often ruin your life as a manager, particularly as a new manager. You've got good in the past, responding to instant demands. And so of course, an instant amount comes up and you respond, it's urgent, it's got to be done now. But if it's not important, what is it doing? It's crowding out the time you need to spend on things. things that are important.

And of course, there are some things that are urgent and important. And without a doubt, these must be your first priority at any one time. They're important because they serve the goals of your job role, the priorities of your bosses, and indeed the strategy of the organization for which work and urgent they have to be done now, because if they're not something will go wrong. Clearly things that are urgent and important, must seize the priority. But new managers find themselves constantly fighting fires in urgent and important mode. And consequently, they become quite quickly stressed by the job.

The most successful managers when you watch them on spending a lot of time dealing with stuff that is urgent and important. What they Doing is focusing on things that are important, but not urgent. Things like planning, preparation, relationship building, even rest and relaxation. None of these things are urgent. Nothing will go wrong if you don't do a plan today, but put it off to tomorrow. Nothing will go wrong if you don't meet an important contact today and put the meeting off to next week.

But what the successful managers have found is that by focusing on things that are important, but not urgent, they tackle things before they ever become urgent. These managers are successful because they are in control of the way they're using their time. And they're successful because they're not getting stressed by a constant flow of one urgent thing, following another Consequently, if you're not being seduced by urgency, you can focus on what's important, do it well, and feeling control. And that brings me on to the third thing, the ultimate tool for being in control your time and effective process for planning. And for that, my preference is for the oats principle. And the oats principle is a four step planning approach.

You can plan your day ahead using the oats principle or a week ahead, or even a month or a quarter ahead a quarter, three months, conveniently, a standard a4 page in your notebook. When you divide that up into five columns and the number of rows, you get very nearly a quarter represented in that so oats planning can work over multiple time horizons. starts with our outcomes. Let's say that you're planning tomorrow. Think about the outcomes you want to achieve tomorrow. What are the important, valuable worthwhile changes that you want to create by the end of tomorrow?

These are your outcomes. And it's essential that you set your ambition and a number of outcomes, which matches the time you're likely to have available to work on them. If you work in a highly reactive environment, and you know that around about half of your day will be spent dealing with the stuff that comes up during the day and setting yourself up for eight hours of work on worthwhile outcomes. you're setting yourself up for failure. If you know you're only going to have four hours of concentrated effort, then set yourself four hours worth of outcomes. Once you've done that, the a step For activities, look at the few outcomes that you've set yourself.

And then for each one, list the activities that you will need to carry out in order to achieve those outcomes. Now, this is not a to do list because a to do list is a never ending list of things that you could do. your to do list is useful to inform your thinking about tomorrow's out plan. But that list of activities notes plan will be tomorrow's today list. Now once you've listed out the activities, the next thing the T airboats stands for estimate the time each one will take. The more you do this, the better you will get at it.

So, initially, you may find yourself having to allow a significant amount of contingency to make up for the fact that we find it difficult to estimate the time of activities. But as you get better and better turreted, you compare down the contingency as your estimates become more reliable. And the S stands for schedule. And this is perhaps the most important single step in and outs plan. It's also the step that fewest people do. Once you've thought about the activities you're going to carry out and the time each one of them's going to take, then schedule those activities into your diary.

Whether you use a paper diary, or an electronic organizer or smartphone or a computer based system, schedule those activities into your diary. Because that way, when someone comes up to you and says, Hey, Mike, it's something I need you to help me with. You can look at your schedule and say, I'm happy to help you. But I've got something on just this moment. I'll get back to you in a couple of hours. That way, you get over another major problem that new managers have The temptation to succumb to every last interruption and disruption.

And that brings me to the final tip for managing your time effectively as a new manager. As you work through your day, your to do list will get longer and longer and each day, if you're doing your own planning, you'll be crossing off some of those to dues bringing them into your rights plant and dealing with them the next day. But what you'll find is, as the weeks go by, and the months go by, there will be some tasks on your to do list that have been there for ages and they never get done. They never make it to do list. They're not on the one hand musts absolutely essential items where there are significant penalties for not doing them. Otherwise, you've done them.

And they're certainly not once on the other hand, they're not the ideas and activities that you would really enjoy doing. Otherwise you do them. The squeeze The middle, the shoulds the things you should do, but you don't, because you don't do them, you feel guilty about them because you feel guilty about them. It saps mental and emotional energy. These are the things that time from time to time, you need to take off your to do list you need to go down your to do list. When you spot one of these it's been hanging around, cross it off and write it on a new sheet of paper.

I said don't list and when you've made your to don't list, you've crossed off lots of items on your to do list and we're very good about that. You then take your to do list. You've screwed it into a small ball and you find it in the small round filing cabinet by the door. So four tips for new managers in managing your time. Firstly, understand what is important in your role. Secondly, distinguish between the important things and the me urgent things.

Use the oats principle for planning your day, your week, even your month or your quarter ahead. And finally, don't forget to use the two don't process to call should items from your to do list from time to time to free yourself up from them. Managing Your time is a critical activity for any new manager.