Did you keep a diary when you were younger? Perhaps you still do. Perhaps sometimes you leaf through the old, trusted pages, casting your eye across the cautious childish letters, across the events and thoughts deeply buried in your memory but here spread so enthusiastically across the page. It's much easier to remember long-past events clearly when you can see them arranged day by day, one after another; time lends to the details a clarity unavailable from memories jumbled together in our minds.

Much the same is true of a diary that deals with plans for the future. The time in front of you will always be much more clearly comprehensible if it's clearly apportioned and divided - instead of 'I must do x and y and z', the future is easier to understand with 'I will be doing x on this day, y on that day, and z immediately afterwards'. And this future planning becomes even more critical with business time; success and failure can rest upon how effectively limited time is used.

After all, successful business isn't conducive to easy, relaxing days, feet up and watching the clouds go by. There'll always be a great deal that needs doing, whether tasks that need to be routinely done on a regular basis, or one-off jobs that form a key stage in the organisation's development. Differing demands will compete for your time; conflicting requests will ensure that it's not always possible to do everything. Even if you can't do it all, though, it's never a bad idea to try and get the most out of the time you have. That way, you can still look to do as much as you can - and do it effectively.

Keeping a diary allows you to be precise about what work you'll need to undertake and when, and about how your time is to be used, helping you to form coherent plans and to prevent any overlapping of tasks. And your diary doesn't necessarily have to help only you to organise your time - time and resources are used that much more effectively if efforts are well coordinated. By letting others know what you'll be doing and when, it becomes that much simpler for them to allocate their time, to know when they will be doing work that is related to your own (perhaps working alongside you, perhaps performing a task that must come immediately before or after yours) and when they can put themselves to a separate job.

Similarly, you can work within the limits set by their own arrangements. It's a very straightforward matter to cooperate effectively, too; Microsoft Outlook provides a useful and simple tool both for arranging a diary and for sharing parts or all of it amongst colleagues and any other relevant parties.

You can take this one stage further and produce a team diary, which all members of the team can view and contribute too. After all, if you're looking at managing time for a number of colleagues working together, progress and the completion of projects will run most smoothly if time and tasks are allocated for everyone together. A team diary helps ensure that everyone's time is used as efficiently as possible, with no conflicts and overlaps, and no time wasted on uncertainty and imprecision. Again, there's a straightforward tool available to make the process easier - with Microsoft SharePoint, tasks and appointments can be added to a calendar by any team member, and be accessed from anywhere in the world, thus keeping cooperation that much closer.

It's this cooperation which is so important to making the most of your time. Your childhood diary might have been a closely guarded secret, but in business sharing is essential. By creating diaries that you and your team can access and relate to, you can ensure that the efforts put in - whether to a specific project or just the everyday running of the business - represent the most efficient and positive use of everyone's time. A short training course can help you create and manage diaries to the benefit of all; knowing how to make effective diaries gives you much more control over where your organisation is heading.