New consultants need more than just recruitment advice. Time management is perhaps the greatest challenge facing new consultants. Ironically, it is an area that has traditionally been ignored with consultants being advised to work longer hours.

An intelligent approach to time management is to work more productively rather than for longer. New consultants in recruitment are often expected and encouraged to work 12-hour days. These long hours end up with new consultants becoming overtired, losing their social lives and feeling resentful towards the company and the industry. It is no wonder then that so many promising consultants leave in their first few months.

An alternative exists, which is to train new consultants in time management. This article offers a number of time management tips to get you started.

Love your diary
Until you are senior enough to have a personal assistant, your diary is key. It should be with you at all times and act as a guide for what you are doing and when to do it. You should devise a set diary layout that enables you to highlight critical calls and activities to assist you in prioritising your workload. Ensure your manager is familiar with your diary, so in the case of any unexpected absence your work can be continued.

Consider the consequences
When considering how to prioritise your activities, consider what the consequences of not doing each one would be. This is a very effective way to see which matters should be dealt with first.

Plan your day the night before
Fifteen minutes spent in the evening planning the calls you are going to make and checking that you have all the necessary paperwork and numbers accessible will save masses of time during the next day.

Not only that, it means that when a consultant goes home they can truly go home.

They don't need to spend the evening worrying about what they will and won't do tomorrow or whether they are properly prepared. Let's face it, we have all done that in recruitment. The final benefit of this will be experienced the next day when on walking into the office the consultant can start working immediately and effectively.

Do things in batches and assign specific times for events
For example, block out some time in your diary to make all your new business calls and a separate block of time for your existing client calls. This enables you to be totally focused on the activity at hand. The more you do it, the better your performance becomes. Switching activities will break your rhythm and reduce your efficiency. These blocks of time should be assigned clear times when they will start and finish. 'Sometime tomorrow' is not sufficient.

Respect your diary
When your diary tells you it's time to perform a certain task don't postpone that task until later. This is very often done with difficult calls or tasks that the consultant would rather delay.

Consider that at the time of planning you put the the call or task in the diary at a specific time for a reason. Don't waste time second guessing yourself. Have faith that your prior planning was good and do that task at the time noted in your diary.

Use deadlines to your advantage
Deadlines are brilliant motivators. Remember that the day before we go on holiday we tend to work at superhuman speed and efficiency. You can have that level of efficiency and speed on a daily basis if you treat deadlines seriously. Be annoyed if you let one pass and speed up as they approach rather than taking the easy way out of working longer hours to compensate.

Build in a safety margin
Stealing a principle from the engineering world, build in a safety margin to your diary.

When assigning time slots to events be realistic and book out a realistic amount of time in your diary to do those activities.