TIME MANAGEMENT

 

As Licensed Immigration Advisers (LIAs), in addition to submitting visas, we need to have interviews with our clients, communicate with third parties such as INZ and the client’s employers and handle emergencies. Therefore, time management is vital for an LIA. Everyone has 24 hours in a day and,  while time itself cannot be managed, we can manage ourselves to be able to fit all our tasks into the day. We need to learn to cultivate the good working habit of prioritising work appropriately so that we can handle the high workloads efficiently and effectively.

Knowing how to prioritise work reasonably can save you a lot of time and increase your productivity.

Classify the work by the time it needs

If we classify the work according to the time that will need to be spent to complete it, all the work can be classified as:

* Work that can be done within 5 minutes

* Work that requires more than 5 minutes to complete

Work that can be done within 5 minutes

If the work can be done within 5 minutes, then I usually choose to do it first. The reasons are as follows:

1. If these things are not handled as quickly as possible, it is easy to forget and the time spent on recording them or recalling them is likely to be much longer than 5 minutes.

2. If trivial things pile up too much, it will take up our brain capacity and slow down the speed of our thinking.

3. If I spend more time on assigning such work rather than doing it, I usually choose to give priority to finishing it first.

4. If these tasks are urgent but not essential, and take only one occasion to arrange, I will assign them to my assistant or other office staff. However, the tasks which I delegate to an unlicensed person, should only be the tasks that do not require giving immigration advice, such as sending an approval letter from INZ, sending invoices or receipts, and translation.

Work that requires more than 5 minutes to complete

If a piece of work takes more than 5 minutes to resolve, then I will classify the work according to its urgency. Most of the work can be divided into the following four kinds: 1. important and urgent; 2. important but not urgent; 3. urgent but not important; 4. neither urgent nor important.

Important and urgent

If something is important and urgent, we should start to do it immediately and try to complete it as soon as possible. For example, if there is a PPI response due the following day for a work visa application and the letter needs to be written, we should give it priority and complete it as soon as possible, because if the INZ sends a PPI letter, it means that the case has the potential to be refused. If we do not write a response letter or provide other supporting evidence as soon as possible, it may generate a negative outcome.

Important but not urgent

If something is important but not urgent, we need to have a plan to do it. We can choose to do such tasks regularly or when we have time. Important but not urgent things may be related to our professional development, optimising service processes, or creating a good relationship with our clients and business partners. In most cases important but not urgent tasks take a longer time to finish and sometimes there is no end to them, and we should try to optimise them continually. For example, as an LIA who holds a provisional licence, we may not have sufficient experience with a certain type of visa, such as Investor Category or Refugee Category. Then we can arrange a weekly meeting to study cases and have discussions with our supervisors. As another example, with the accumulation of our experience, we may have a better idea about which information we should gather for a certain kind of visa, and we can improve our client-information-gathering system from time to time or regularly.

Urgent but not important

If something is urgent but not important, we can assign it to others to do. For example, as mentioned above, sending a visa approval letter is a task of this nature and it does not require the dispensing of immigration advice. Therefore, it can be assigned to other office staff to do and save the time of an LIA.

Neither urgent nor important

If things are neither important nor urgent, we can remove them from the task list.

In conclusion, the work which can be completed within five minutes needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. Urgent and important work needs to be prioritised. Important but not urgent work needs to be planned and be dealt with continually. Urgent but not important work can be assigned to other office staff, and the work which is neither urgent nor important can be deleted.