How to Test Your Time Management Skillsby Ellis Davidson, Demand MediaMany time management methodologies compete for your time, attention and money through their promises of transforming you into a superhuman task machine. But in truth, there is only one measure of your time management skills, which is whether you are personally satisfied with your work output.

Step 1Evaluate your goals for improving your time management skills. These could be that you want to spend more time per day working on your long-range goals rather than administrative trivia, or that you are unable to bring your projects to a close on the schedules you set for yourself. Few people already feel that they are working at optimum efficiency--and none have read this far in this article!--so determine a short list of specific areas which you wish to improve.

Step 2Keep detailed records of how you currently spend your time, without attempting to make any changes to your existing work habits. You cannot make effective changes to your own work system before you have accurate measures of your current habits. Look for ways in which you can make your time self-documenting; for example, some phone systems automatically log timestamps and the length of every call, which can be used to record your time spent on the phone. If your work phone does not do this, your cell phone does.

Related Reading: How Can Poor Time Management Skills Cause Conflicts in a Company?Step 3Continue with your measurement process, but instead of keeping time records as you did in the previous step, monitor your progress on your daily or ongoing goals, and track how often you meet your own deadlines. If you regularly end the day with an unfinished to-do list that must be rolled over into the next, perhaps you need to be more efficient, or perhaps you have an impossible list of tasks to complete. When you estimate that a project will take you two weeks, and it takes you three, you need to improve your time allocation during that period, or you need to improve on your ability to estimate how long some projects will take.

Step 4Brainstorm a list of ideas of how you might improve your efficiency, using the data you collected in the previous steps. Many people find that the simple act of recording their time, and monitoring their work output vs. the goals they have set for themselves, results in three understandings: first, that you are probably better at time management than you thought; second, that your issue is more a question of how many responsibilities you are adopting, rather than your ability to complete them; and third, that there are obvious holes in your work methodology that can be easily plugged once they are identified.

Step 5Repeat this process as necessary. New habits can be learned through repetition, but new bad habits can also be introduced if you don't pay close enough attention. If the previous

step did not give you clear ideas on how to move forward, use the self-improvement technique that Benjamin Franklin suggested in his autobiography more than two centuries ago: choose one, and only one, area for improvement, and focus on it relentlessly until you have discovered its flaws and how to correct them.

Tip

At any point during this process, you may benefit from sampling the buffet of time management systems, and seeing if any fit what you are naturally doing. Three excellent books on the topic are David Allen's "Getting Things Done", Neil Fiore's "The Now Habit" and Steven Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". These approaches are very different, so don't choose a single plan until you know that it meets your needs and temperament.

References (4) About the AuthorEllis Davidson has been a self-employed Internet and technology consultant, entrepreneur and author since 1993. He has written a book about self-employment for recent college graduates and is a regular contributor to "Macworld" and the TidBITS technology newsletter. He is completing a book on self-employment options during a recession. Davidson holds a Bachelor of Arts in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.