If You Can’t Save Time How Do You Manage it?

Time management is one of the first lessons in any Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. Time cannot be saved, it is not a tangible currency that can be put in a vault or held in a banking account. Time is ticking no matter what we do. Everyone will spend time either waste it on things that are not valuable and don’t bring value in the future or invest it in useful things that bring more value in the future. Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1746 wrote “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander Time; for that’s the Stuff Life is made of” and “Lost Time is never found again”. It has been proved that top achievers are not more intelligent but they manage time more intelligently and effectively. In a previous post, we emphasized how eye care professionals like business administrators are required to ace time management, and the more they are good at time management the more they are productive and are able to sustain growth and career development. Mastering time management for an Optometrist is crucial to identifying which tasks are not worth spending time on and which tasks are worth investing time in.

Basic simple steps to improve time management include setting reminders for every task, creating daily weekly and monthly planners, prioritizing tasks, setting well defined times and deadlines for each task, stopping and eliminating all distractions, and establishing daily and weekly routines. When it comes to prioritizing tasks the 4D process (Do, Defer (Delay), Delegate, and Delete (Drop) helps in identifying tasks that should be done, tasks that should be deferred and delegated, tasks that should be delayed, and tasks that should be dropped or deleted from your schedule.

Bryan Tracy, author of best-selling books on motivation and leadership asserts that “Strategic time management” starts with asking four basic sets of questions that aim to identify your current state or position, how you got into your current state, where you want to get in the future, and how are you going to do it? He explains that the essence is to be able to set goals and work to achieve them. Moreover, he describes a goal-achieving formula that consists of seven steps. The seven steps basically consist of setting goals, writing them down as plans, setting deadlines, designating everything possible you can do, creating checklists (of do first, do next, etc), starting executing, and getting feedback as you progress from one step to the next.

When it comes to distinguishing “investing time” from “wasting time”, optometrists and practice managers should start by making weekly and monthly lists of all the tasks they do and divide them into activities and tasks that waste time and tasks that invest time. Applying the 4D process will lead them to select the tasks they invest time in and defer, delay, or delete the others.