I was recently chatting to a business coach in Israel. I was surprised to see that when it came to time management, most of his clients are senior managers, even CEOs.

We are talking about people with experience, at the peak of their careers .  Either they have set up the company or they have risen through the ranks, ending up at the top of the tree. So you would expect them to be able to manage their time and know how to run a company efficiently.

Ask yourself candidly: Are you really in control of your time? In the average day, how many hours are you forced to allocate to putting out fires rather than creating new opportunities. What proportion of time is given over to matching the demands of the CEO, so that we forget why we came to work?

Here are three simple tips, which will are designed to improve your use of time.

1)      Don’t spend the first few minutes of the day checking your diary, sorting out what you need to do. Empirically this is considered the most productive part of many people’s day. That task should have been completed at the end of the previous day.

2)      When you allocate tasks for specific days, assign them a period of time, just as if they are an appointment. This allows you to visualise clearly exactly how much time you have for other tasks and so called emergencies.

3)      Think in advance who is going to demand something from you and preempt the issue.

And here’s the catch, as the coach commented back to me. Most of us know about these tips. What we refuse to recognize is that we do not act on them. And what many are afraid to ask is “why” – what’s stopping us carrying out the obvious.