Time Management for Support Staffers: 8 Steps to Bring Order to a Chaotic World

If you’ve attended a time-management seminar, you may have reacted with disbelief. Setting priorities, defining tasks, breaking tasks into subtasks, and scheduling activities all seem to apply to the orderly world of project management, not the chaotic mess support people live in. But there are ways to practice sound time management in that chaos. Here are eight simple steps to put order on chaos.

Know your goals
Are you a little fuzzy on your lifetime goals? Now’s a great time to clarify them so you can start the New Year fresh. Lifetime goals can be big and ambitious, and it’s OK if they’re inspiring but somewhat vague. “I want to be a Renaissance person with many interests and talents” or “I’ll be a respected technical guru” are fair game.

Having clear lifetime goals helps make practical choices. If you want to be a technical guru, it makes sense to volunteer for the new product team, rather than a stint in account management.

Be SMART
Lifetime goals are wonderful but they may well remain unfulfilled unless you define short-term, explicit goals. Think SMART: specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. “Make customers happy” is not a SMART goal; “increase my average customer satisfaction rating from 8 to 8.1 this quarter” is.
Many organizations define performance goals. Are yours SMART? If not, suggest improvements – or simply define additional goals for yourself.

Make a daily plan
A daily plan in a support environment, is that crazy? It is crazy to schedule every moment of a day that must accommodate firefighting, but it makes perfect sense to make a list of commitments due that day and to block time for scheduled calls.
A daily plan is useful even if you don’t quite get to every item on your list. When you see what did not get done, you can take appropriate action to apologize to the customer you could not reach, or ask for help.
Some people like to create their daily plan for the next day before they leave the office, they feel they can then leave the office behind. If you’re always rushing out to make the daycare pickup time, first thing in the morning may be better. No matter when you do it, it’s important to just do it!

Make time for your important goals
Human beings tend to attend to urgent issues: the phone is ringing, the customer needs help now, the status report is due today. Discipline yourself to focus on at least a few important, but not urgent goals each day or each week. You may need to come in early, stay late, or hide out but if you want to learn a new skill (or simply to exercise, an important but never urgent goal), you will have to make time for it. Block out the time required on your daily plan.

Time-slice
Can we be more productive by doing several things at once? No, we only have one brain, and that brain can attend to only one (significant) thing at a time. Therefore give your full attention to just one activity at any given time, but set a reasonable time limit to pause and re-evaluate whether to move on to something else. In other words: time-slice.

Have a system
If you need to perform the same task repeatedly, whether it’s closing a case, escalating an issue to engineering, or conducting a staff meeting, create a good system to get the task done quickly and properly. (Effective) routines can really speed things up.

Don’t procrastinate
Do you catch yourself rescheduling the same task over and over again? Is it truly important? If not, just drop it. Do you hate doing it? Grit your teeth and just do it or find someone else to do it for you. Is it overwhelming? Divide it into smaller pieces. Many of us spend more time avoiding dreaded tasks than actually doing it.

Try a time log
If you’re struggling with unachieved goals, missed deadlines, and dropped commitments, use a time log to diagnose the problem. Get yourself a simple paper grid and jot down what you do every 15 minutes. You only need to do this for a couple of days. When you’re done, compare your time log to your goals: are you working on the right things? Are you wasting time on activities that aren’t useful? Cut out the unnecessary or less important activities and you will find your productivity rise.

About the Author
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She offers time management workshops specifically designed for support centers. For more information, visit www.ftworks.com or call 650 559 9826