You find yourself reading it everywhere these days – working hours getting longer, demands of the job getting busier, more demanding. As a result, time management has become crucial when it comes to furthering your career by making sure your hours are not being wasted by menial tasks that, frankly, you could do without.

Getting the most out of your day is not as easy as it necessarily sounds. While planning and writing everything down in terms of how your week is set to run is a great first step, you need to make sure that there is also room to manoeuvre if you end up needing a contingency plan – as things never always go as smoothly as you may plan for them to in your day.

Don’t waste time travelling

With this in mind, you need to make sure not a single hour of your time is wasted – as every one is an hour you’ll never be getting back.

For example, how long do you spend each week travelling to meetings? If, say, you live in Manchester and you have to go to meet a client or a colleague based in London, there are at least four hours there that you are effectively ‘off the grid’, unless there are specific tasks you can be getting on with while sitting on the train.

So how do we avoid wasting such valuable time? By using  teleconferencing services, you can still hold your meeting with that client or colleague, face-to-face, without ever leaving the office. The benefits of using this technology are obvious and not only do you save both money and time when you consider the alternative of travelling in person

Plan your week

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail is a great mantra to take on when it comes to getting the most out of your working week.

The importance of having a structured and well thought-out day shouldn’t be underestimated and can really make a massive difference in squeezing every last minute out of your week.

One suggestion is to plan out your week to make sure that any meetings you need to have take place on either Monday or Tuesday. This is so that when work is naturally generated from them, you have the remaining three days to find space to make sure that those tasks are completed. There’s nothing worse than having a Friday meeting which results in a Monday deadline!

Similarly, it’s also a great idea to try and create a set time or day for any other regular tasks that you have to complete – this way you are getting into a routine which will ultimately make you feel more in control if your workload starts to pile up.

Prioritise

Of course, a key part of making sure you are getting the best out of your working to day is to make sure that you waste as little of it as possible.

Try to avoid getting sucked into spending the entire days answering emails – it could be a good idea to have a specific slot (or slots) during your day when you work through them all at once, rather than have every single one disrupt whatever task you are trying to focus on at that time.

Similarly, be wary of deadlines when planning your week out – make sure you give yourself enough time to complete work with the constraints you are given and allow yourself breathing space just in case something else does end up needing your urgent attention.