There is no substitute for enrolling in a management training course to expand your skills as a modern manager. But if you can adopt the following five simple steps, your job will become easier and more enjoyable

Clarify your objectives –
Set yourself clear objectives, and make they are SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed. If your objectives don’t contain these criteria, they’re not clear objectives.

Prioritise –
Whatever technique you use, you must prioritise your time. Consider what is urgent and important, important but not urgent, and urgent but not important. Tackle them in that order.

Clear your desk –
At the end of the day, file away loose paperwork, and make your desk as clear as humanely possible. At first this may seem challenging. But when you walk in to your office the next day, you’ll feel you have a clear mind to start your day positively.

To do lists –
Finish your day by writing a to-do list for the following day. Be realistic and consider your schedule, don’t write an endless list difficult to achieve, and allow yourself time for unforeseen circumstances. Leave it on your desk to review and action the following morning. Take a highlighter pen, and mark off your task from your to-do lists as you do them. Don’t cross them out. If at the end of the day you have a bright and luminous page, you’ll have a sense of achievement.

Delegate –
Stop trying to do it all yourself, trust in your sub-ordinates and get them to help you. Delegate not just the responsibility for a task, but the authority to carry it out.

Much has been discussed and written about the important of setting objectives as a modern manager. Management training courses will focus on sharpening your objective setting skills, and provide you with an awareness of the need to focus on what you want to achieve.

However, it must be pointed out that there is a typical flaw when it comes to tackling the array of objectives managers set themselves. Instead of focusing on the outcome, too often objectives become a set of activities that need to be carried out. This is a fatal flaw, the whole point about having a good objective, is that it’s only about the result.

Let’s look at some typical examples of objectives a manager might set themselves:

- Improve staff morale in relation to absence
- Investigate decrease in productivity
- Analyse customer retention options

These all look like good ideas at a glance, but when you really drill down, they don’t mean anything! We can all flatter ourselves at the use of flashy verbs in deciding what to do at any given moment, but actually have we made a decision on what specifically we want to make happen?

The next time you set yourself an objective, make it a specific and measurable goal. Follow through your thinking; to use the first example above, say to yourself

“I’m going to find out the factors affecting staff morale by compiling an anonymous questionnaire and inviting informal discussions, and my aim is to reduce sickness absence by 10 percent.”

One of the greatest challenges that a manager faces in today’s fast-paced competitive environment is prioritisation. You have a choc-a-bloc to-do list and objectives coming out of your ears, but it’s clear that you can’t get them all done in the time available. Often, asking your superiors for guidance on what’s most important doesn’t help either – they just want them all done!

Trying to prioritise your work flow can be a real head scratcher for even the most accomplished managers. That’s why prioritisation and time management are increasingly prominent subjects in sales training courses and management training.

If you’ve set your objectives properly, they will all have time targets – a specific time period when you want to achieve your objective by. The trouble is, you may have several concurrent objectives running at one time, and they may have time targets that are too distant or similar to help you right now.

A first simple step is to list your objectives, and allocate them a column entitled ‘priority’. Start by allocating them a qualitative or quantitative value; ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ or a rating of one to five. This will help to put them into a bit of perspective, and if you have a clash of priority, you’ll know which to tackle first.

Regularly review you priority ratings for your objectives, as they are likely to change over time.

A common frustration from a middle manager is that they have difficulty in managing their own time. It sometimes seems that the to-do list is getting longer, and the pressure is piling up. It’s easy to blame others, and claim that they are making unreasonable demands on your time, or even that they have changed their mind on when something was supposed to happen by.

The situation is often made worse if you work in an environment where you are subject to regular interruptions from your co-workers and sub-ordinates. If you’re faced with these frustrations its time you took a step back and took a long hard look at the situation.

The person who has the most control over your time is you. Take responsibility for the way you do your work and the time you allocate to do it. This is why many managers take the decisive step to undertake some management training to equip them with the requisite time and work flow techniques to change the way they work.

When you learn to take control of your time, perhaps by learning to prioritise, learning to allocate realistic schedules and learn when to say ‘not right now’, you will stop fire-fighting and starting producing results.