A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Education in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Education in the Department of Social Science Education at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2014 / Effective time utilisation leads to greater freedom to use time as one would like to: to do more of the things one has always wanted to do; in short to enjoy life more. Like in any other business organisation, time for planning, organising, leading and controlling is managed carefully. The principal needs time to perform all the above mentioned tasks. In this study, the author accentuates that it is disconcerting that from time to time, there are schools that do not even have a time table when the schools open at the beginning of the year. It would be interesting to know how much time might be wasted as a result of a lack of planning, lack of priorities, paperwork and reading, meetings, unclear objectives, procrastination, lack of delegation, incompetent subordinates and many other time wasters. The purpose of the study was to determine the school principal’s understanding of the time management task and explore how effective school principals manage time in performing their different tasks. Fifty principals from Phumelela and Umbumbulu Circuits, under the Umlazi District completed a survey questionnaire and semi structured interviews were conducted. The researcher was able to determine the pattern of time usage. The findings revealed that factors hampering time management include among other things meetings that principals have to attend, departmental expectations, visitors, the organisational stress, administrative obligations and inability to differentiate between urgent and important matters to attend to hampers the principal’s time management tasks. The study among other things recommended that the provincial education departments need to provide appropriate training for school governing bodies that a well organised and goal directed system should operate to control school visitors in the schools’ interest.