Productivity is one of a leader’s chief concerns. Leaders are constantly looking at how they can be more efficient in getting things done. That is why leaders want to get leadership skills training so they can master such skills as delegation, problem solving and decision making. Another skill that leaders often struggle with is time management. Therefore, leaders take the usual pattern of: if I need to improve in time management, I will take a time management course.

More often than not, time management issues are really not time management issues, but goal clarification issues. Goal clarification issues center around what has to get done, what is the priority of things to get done, and what it takes to get it done.

Do You Really Need A Time Management Course?

Let’s look at an illustration about goals and priorities. Let’s say you are so busy you can’t take anything else on your plate. Every waking minute you are deeply involved in some activity or trying to get something done. Now let’s say you visit the doctor and the doctor says in order for you to maintain your health you are going to have to take some treatments every day for the next 20 days and each treatment takes about 5 hours.

Now before the doctor’s visit you could not take anything else on your plate. All of a sudden your priorities change. You now can make time to do the treatments. What happens to the other stuff that you “had” to do before? That stuff either doesn’t get done or someone else does it which means that what they were originally doing doesn’t get done.

The first rule of time management is that there will always be something to do and everything will not get done. Time management is about doing the most important things first. If you are doing the most important things first you know how to manage your time. You’re probably thinking what if I don’t know how to go about doing the most important thing in the most efficient way? Well, this is a training issue on the thing not time management.

So the first thing you want to do to manage your time is to decide what has to get done. Make a complete list of all that has to get done. Then you have to determine what is the priority of things that have to get done. This can be a collective decision of the team or you as the leader can make the decision. Once you have determined what has to get done and the order in which it is to get done, then you have to determine what it takes to get things done.

This can be challenging because there might be some action steps that you have no idea how long it will take to complete. In addition, you want to balance setting a time frame that forces you to stretch yourself and at the same time is achievable. Mastering this area comes with practice. Set your targets and if you need to adjust, you adjust.

The next time you say: “I need to take a time management course”, remember the issue is probably not a time management issue, but a goals clarification issue. When you have your goals clear and know the priority of those goals, time management becomes easier.