It only takes a minute to find ways to tame time

The phone is constantly ringing, colleagues keep asking you for a favour, the e-mails are building up and by the time you get around to getting some actual work done, it's almost 5.30pm. If this scenario sounds familiar, it may be time to start working smarter instead of harder.

Conor O'Connell, managing director of training consultancy Time Management International (TMI) Ireland, argues that employees should concentrate on achieving results instead of spending time "being busy" and responding to queries.

"People will tell me they were 'up the walls' today, but they didn't strike anything off their to-do list," he says. "One of the critical things in time management is blocking off time for a certain task and telling yourself, for example, that you will get that report or spreadsheet done during that period."

More than 200,000 people attend TMI's programmes in its 40 centres worldwide to learn how to better manage their time. In Ireland, TMI has trained employees from companies such as Oracle, Wyeth Medica, Pfizer, and Goodbody Stockbrokers on how to work more effectively.

"One of the things I say on these programmes is that you don't need to have your e-mail on all the time," O'Connell says. "Check it first thing in the morning and leave it off. If an e-mail is so urgent, the person can ring you. Also, your phone doesn't need to be on all the time. You can use your voicemail cleverly, such as by leaving a message each morning saying, 'I'm in the office today but I will be unavailable between 10 and 12'. This will help you get your important tasks done."

O'Connell helped employees at a pharmaceutical company manage their time effectively by introducing "red time" and "green time".

Between 9.30am and 10.30am, the "red time", staff do not call each other or approach anyone else's desk. The receptionist even directs callers to voicemail. However, colleagues are then available both to each other and to callers during the allocated "green time".

Office staff are interrupted every 11 minutes, on average, and these interruptions consume about 2.1 hours of each working day, a research study from the University of California has shown. One expert in the study described this as "work-induced attention-deficit disorder".

"We are bad time managers because we are nice and drop what we are doing to help someone else," O'Connell says. "But the most important word in time management is 'no'. You can tell your colleague that you would love to help them but you are in the middle of something and to come back at 12 when you have time."

Professionals spend too much of their time answering e-mails, text messages, voice messages and BlackBerry messages. E-mail in particular is dominating the working day. According to a recent survey by Symantec, 52 per cent of workers spend two hours a day reading, replying to and creating e-mails.

The volume of e-mail received by businesses rose 47 per cent in 2005 alone, leaving users more dependent on e-mail than ever before.

"When you do receive e-mails, immediately delete all the irrelevant messages you can, based on the e-mails' headings," O'Connell says. "The remaining e-mails will require an action. Go to Microsoft Outlook, drag the e-mail across to the task tab, instantly turning it into a task. When you do this, you can put the task into a certain category and give it a start date and a due date and Outlook stores it as a job.

"The calendar function reminds you to do that task on the day you have slotted it in for. The whole process is seamless."

"When you have done this, get into the habit of creating a daily plan for yourself the night before so you hit the ground running when you come into work," he says. "You are not engraving this plan in stone but it will help you start to defend your time."