Time is our most precious commodity. We have a limited amount of it and once gone, it cannot be replaced. Time management is something that we all have to do, in our personal lives as well as every day in our work, to maximise our effectiveness.

It's not something that anyone teaches you as a child, yet it's a skill that can greatly enhance your productivity and quality of life.

Good time management can enable you to handle the type of large workload that is becoming ever more common these days as businesses seek to sqeeze more out of their employees.

It can help you gain a promotion and it can limit the encroachment of work into your personal life.

So here are 10 tips to make you better at managing your work:

1. Do the most important thing first.

When you sit down to work in the morning, before you check any e-mail, spend some time on the most important thing on your to-do list. Even if you can't get the whole thing done in the time you can allocate, you'll be much more likely to go back to it once you've got it started. This can work best if you organise the night before so when you sit down to work you already know what your most important task of the day is.

2. Break the multi-tasking habit.

For people who didn't grow up watching TV, typing out instant messages and doing homework all at the same time, multi-tasking is deadly. But it decreases everyone's productivity, no matter who they are and no matter how old they are - and that includes the younger people who may be more comfortable with it. So try to limit it.

3. Don't leave e-mail sitting in your in box.

Organise e-mail in file folders. If the message needs more thought, move it to your to-do list. If it's for reference, print it out. If it's a meeting, move it to your calendar.

It helps to touch things only once. Take action on an e-mail as soon as you read it.

4. Check your e-mail on a schedule.

Dan Markovitz, president of the productivity consulting firm TimeBack Management, says: "It's not effective to read and answer every e-mail as it arrives. Just because someone can contact you immediately does not mean that you have to respond to them immediately. People want a predictable response, not an immediate response."

So as long as people know how long to expect an answer to take, and they know how to reach you in an emergency, you can answer most types of e-mail just a few times a day.

5. Make haste slowly.

A good time manager actually responds to some things more slowly than a bad time manager would. For example, someone who is doing the highest priority task is probably not answering incoming e-mail while they're doing it. As Markovitz writes: "Obviously there are more important tasks than processing e-mail. Intuitively, we all know this. What we need to do now is recognise that processing one's work (evaluating what's come in and how to handle it) and planning one's work are also mission-critical tasks."

6. Bookmark website addresses.

Use bookmarking services like del.icio.us to keep track of web sites. Instead of having random notes about places you want to check out, places you want to keep as a reference, etc., you can save them all in one place, and you can search and share your list easily.

7. Know when you work best.

Each person has a best time of day, when they feel the most productive. You can discover yours by monitoring your productivity over a period of time. Then you need to manage your schedule to keep your best time free for your most important work.

8. Be economical with your keystrokes.

If you're on a computer all day, keystrokes matter because efficiency matters. If you do a dozen Google searches in day, ask yourself how many keystrokes it takes. If you can reduce it, you might save 15 seconds, but over time, that builds up.

9. Make it easy to get started.

Most people don't have problems finishing projects, but starting them is another matter. Some experts recommend you "make a shallow on-ramp". Breaking your my projects down into manageable pieces makes a project seem less overwhelming.

10. Organise your to-do list every day.

In order to manage your time effectively, you need to know exactly what it is you're trying to get done. Whether you write it out by hand or type it into your cell phone or computer calendar, it can slice your day up into manageable chunks.