Why use time management
skills?
It's important that you
develop effective strategies for managing your time to balance the conflicting
demands of time for study, leisure, earning money. Time management skills are
valuable in many other aspects of life.
Sometimes it may seem that
there isn't enough time to do everything that you need to. This can lead to a
build up of stress. Once you have identified ways in which you can improve the
management of your time, you can begin to adjust your routines and patterns of behavior to reduce any time-related stress in your lives.
What skills are required
for effective time management?
Some of these skills
including setting clear goals, breaking your goals down into discreet steps,
and reviewing your progress towards your goals are covered in Action Planning.
Other skills involved
include prioritizing - focusing on urgent and important tasks rather than those
that are not important or don't move you towards your goals; organizing your
work schedule; list making to remind you of what you need to do when;
persevering when things are not working out and avoiding procrastination.
1. Using Lists: Keeping a
to-do List
You should have a reminder
system to tell you of when you need to do what: don't try to remember
everything in your head as this is a recipe for disaster! Carry a pen and paper
or organizer wherever you go. At the simplest level your reminder system could
simply be to use your diary to write down the things you need to do, including
appointments and deadlines.
A daily list of tasks that
need to be done will focus your mind on important objectives and is an
essential part of action planning. Refer to and update this regularly.
Prioritise items on the list into important/not important and
urgent/non-urgent. Such a list can take a variety of formats. Update your list
daily, crossing off completed tasks and adding new tasks that need to be done.
Urgent or important tasks can be highlighted with an asterisk.
2. Setting Goals
Set yourself specific and
clearly defined goals, and make sure that these are realistic and achievable.
To do this, you first need to examine your present situation and assess what
goals are important to you and what action you need to take to achieve your
target. Have a contingency plan or alternative route to your goal in case you
have to change your plans.
3.
Efficiency and
effectiveness are not the same. Someone who works hard and is well organised
but spends all their time on unimportant tasks may be efficient but not
effective. To be effective, you need to decide what tasks are urgent and
important and to focus on these. This is called prioritizing. It's important to
list the tasks you have and to sort these in order of priority, and then to
devote most time to the most important tasks. This avoids the natural tendency
to concentrate on the simple, easy tasks and to allow too many interruptions to
your work. Differentiate also between urgent and important tasks: an urgent
task may not necessarily be important.
The best practice of
prioritizing means taking conscious control of your choices and choosing to
spend more time on the projects and tasks that are important and valuable, and
less time on the ones that are not as important or valuable.
This may sound obvious, but
the fact is that the vast majority of people don’t put much thought on how they
spend their time. They just flow through life going wherever the current will
take them, doing whatever grabs their attention next or repeating the same
things day after day out of habit and routine.
ABCD Prioritization
One system for prioritizing
your projects and tasks is the ABCD method. With this method, you go through
each item in your list and assign it one of four labels:
- The A's are assigned to projects and
tasks that are important or
valuable, or that are important and need to be completed right away
because of an impending deadline.
- The B's are assigned to projects and
tasks that are “under review” because they are not as important as any of
the A’s, but they are still worth considering. You may need/want to do
them at some future point, but you haven’t committed to them just yet.
- The C's are assigned to projects and
tasks that you may want to do at some future time, but you are not even
considering doing them right now because they are not important or
valuable enough compared to everything else on your plate.
- The D's are assigned to projects and
tasks that you are not planning to do. They are not worth your time and
energy.
It may seem strange to
leave the D projects and tasks in your lists, but if they made it there it’s
because at some point you thought you might need or want to do them. Rather
than lose track of them, just keep these items in your list in case they pop up
again or you change your mind and decide that you would like to do some of
them.
Once you’ve labelled all
your projects and tasks, focus on the A's and assign individual priority rank
values to the top five to ten items: A1 for the most important, A2 for the next
most important, and so on.
You can usually tell which
of two items is more important by asking yourself “If I could only complete one
of these but not both, which one would I choose?” Your choice represents the
more important task. If you think two tasks are equally important, just assign
the same priority value to both of them.
If you have more than ten
items at any given level, you don't have to assign rank numbers to all of them.
Just rank the top five to ten items and leave the others
with their general labels (A, B, etc.) When you complete all your ranked tasks,
you can choose the next five to ten most important items and
rank them appropriately.
4. Avoiding Procrastination
Procrastination is the
scourge of action planning. It's important that you manage 'Your fear of doing
things' you don't want to do and realise that the fear is often far worse than
any possible negative results. Try to take decisions immediately when possible
and when you don't need to gather more information pertinent to the decision.
The best time to do something is usually NOW. Taking action generates the
impetus for further action.
5. Breaking down tasks
Break goals down into their
components so that you can accomplish them one step at a time. Write these
steps down, and try to be as specific as you can when you do this. Try to
complete one task before you go on to the next.
Reward yourself for
achieving these goals to maintain your enthusiasm. Regularly review your
progress towards your goals and revise plans as appropriate to take account of
unforeseen changes.
6. Persevering
Inevitably, things will not
always run smoothly as you progress towards your goals. When things are not
working out, you need to persevere and learn how to take a positive attitude
towards frustration and failure.
Mistakes are a crucial part
of any creative process and each is a lesson leading you towards the right solution.
Fear of making or admitting mistakes is a major handicap to taking effective
action. It is said that the people who have achieved the most have made the
most mistakes! Try to be aware that satisfaction comes as much from pursuing
goals as from achieving them.
Work at effective
strategies to deal with pressure - these can vary from taking exercise, to
relaxation techniques such as Yoga, to simply sharing problems with friends.
Being assertive can also help here, for example, politely saying no to the
demands of others when you are pushed for time. Sharing tasks and problems with
others will spread the burden and will bring a fresh perspective to them.
7. Organizing your time
Identify areas of your life
where you are wasting time and try to reduce these. A good way to do this is to
log everything you do for a week in meticulous detail and then examine your
record to see how you use (or misuse!) your time.
Develop a regular work
routine. Keep your work space tidy so that you can work efficiently - it's hard
to do this if things you need to find are buried under a pile of paper! Work to
schedule so that you meet deadlines in good time - don't leave everything until
the last minute. If you have a difficult presentation to give, start by
drafting out the structure first- this will break the ice.
8. USING A TIME LOG
One useful way to eliminate
wasted time is to use a time log. First you need to make up a chart for the
next seven days divided into half hour intervals starting at the time you get
up and finishing at the time you go to bed. Write down what you did in each
half hour of the day for the next seven days. Choose a typical week. At the end
of the week examine your time log and ask yourself the following questions:
-Are there any periods that
I could use more productively?
-At what time of day do I
do my most effective work?
Some people are most alert
in the morning, whilst others concentrate best during the afternoon or evening.
Schedule your most important tasks for these times of day. A time log can be
particularly useful at times of pressure.
By now you should have been
able to identify ways in which you could manage your time more efficiently, and
know some techniques to allow you to do this. You might like to look at the
section on action planning which identifies other ways of organizing your work
so that you achieve your goals.
One way that employers may
measure your time management skills at interview is via an in-tray exercise.
All For Time and Time For
All: The 10 Commandments of Time Management
How many times did you hear
the phrases “Excuse me, please, I don’t have the time for that”, or “I’m in a
hurry”? As far as I remember, I heard that at least once.
If you heard a thing more
often in your life, isn’t it already shaping your habits? I’ve read the other
day that it takes 20 days of practicing, in order to form a habit. If 20 days
can form a habit, 10000 days can reshape a character. How do we fight this
undesired modelling which tends to turn us into machines, to transform us into
all kinds of freaks and workaholics, who hurry up their entire life, only to
discover at the end that they reached a dip and it is too late to get out?
Wherever a problem arises,
there comes at least one expert who figures out a solution. And the solution
for this rat race (any other animal would do here; don’t you think a snail is
always in a hurry? Think again!) was called TIME MANAGEMENT.
Leaving time management
experts aside, these are a few habits I’ve developed, which proved to work in
helping me live at my own pace and still have (almost) everybody around me
happy:
1. Don’t wait until things
become urgent
2. Make a to do list
3. Dare to break the to do
list
Be flexible. You are your
most valuable asset, so don’t stress yourself. If by noon your list becomes out of
age, don’t be afraid to change it. The “noon ” you may be a different
person from the “morning you”. Doing things when you are in the mood saves you
a lot of time
4. When things tend to get out
of control,
don’t blame anybody (including yourself), but look for solutions, No matter how
much we like to think that we are in control, there are times in life when
things take an unexpected course. It is very easy to screw up a project, or a
trip. A lot of people try to seek out the guilty, wasting their time to collect
evidences, to playback the failure over and over, to match the punishment with
the guilt. If you recognize yourself in these words, at least for once in your
life, please try to leave behind all this guilt-punishment mechanism, and focus
your energy on what to do next. Seek for solutions. Think for future, not for
the past. Think “how?”, “not why?” Don’t you see how much more constructive
this approach can be? It can save you a lot of time, believe me. Not to mention
that your peers will love you for that.
5. Know when to quit
Don’t continue doing
something just because you started. Life is not a competition. If you don’t
find a reason anymore, just quit and start something new. In Seth Godin on the
Fine Art of Quitting, Steve Olson says:
I must admit, I have quit
all my big ventures in the dip. But I don’t feel bad about quitting, because
each time they were strategic decisions. The only regret I have is not quitting
earlier.
6. Don’t look back in anger
Re-playing over and over
all the sad moments lived, will only make you feel frustrated, resulting into
time waste, so do not waste your valuable time on digging past shit.
7. Delegation
Do not spend time on a work
that can be done, to a satisfactory level, by your subordinate. Delegation
saves your time and develops subordinates. It improves results by making fuller
use of resources. Delegation implies transferring initiative and authority.
8. “No” is also an answer
Please take a moment and do
this test with a friend: in the middle of the conversation, pretend to drop
something on the floor. Watch your friend’s reaction. I believe it is somehow
in the human nature to help others. Was your friend trying to take that item
from the floor and give it back to you? It is nice to help the others, but if
100 people just drop an item on the floor at same time, I could possibly pick
up only one or two. The other 98 or 99 people will have to understand that “no”
is also an answer, and this does not make me mean. It’s just my resources are
limited. Learn how to say no, and you’ll better manage your time.
9. Take 30 minutes of day
dreaming every day. This is good for motivation. If it is true that motivated
people work faster, then re-gaining your motivation from time to time may make
you a more efficient person.
10. Remember that “all
roads DO NOT lead to Rome
TRAF Technique Saves Time
Do you measure your success
by the time you spend working? If so, you are missing the point. Many people
today believe that real success lies in mastering techniques that help them
simplify their lives and make their work more efficient so they can spend time
doing what they really want to do instead of working overtime!
“You would be amazed by how
relaxed some incredibly successful executives are,” says Stephanie Winston. She
should know, because she is the original “Organized Executive” and author of a
best-selling book and a newsletter by the same name. She coaches senior-level
professionals at some of the world’s top companies on how to accomplish more in
less time. Her models are executives whose successful careers are matched only
by their satisfying personal lives.
Winston’s TRAF Technique
has helped many people achieve their goal of simplifying their lives so they
can do more of what they want. When you think of how many messages arrive in
your mail and computer each day, it can be daunting. The real task is to handle
each message quickly and efficiently and that can be accomplished by using the
TRAF Technique to make sure each message results in an action.
There are only a few things
you can do with a message, regardless of whether it is a piece of paper or an
electronic message. One of the best time savers you can learn is to make sure
you handle each message the first time you pick it up. Handling it can mean
actually taking care of it or making a decision about what needs to be done.
According to Winston, you can toss it, Refer it, Act on it, File it, or lay it
aside to read it—such as with a magazine or advertisement. Let’s take a closer
look at how this technique can save time if you apply it to your messages in
the following order.
Toss It
When I open either regular
mail or e-mail messages, I do it with a trash basket close at hand. Once I pick
up a message, I don’t lay it down again unless I have made a decision about how
to handle it. When I recognize a piece of “junk mail,” I save time by not even
opening the envelope. Rarely do I regret throwing something away before I open
it. Before you make a decision on whether or not to toss it, you might want to
ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that could happen if I throw this out?”
If I can’t just “toss” the message, then I consider whether I can refer it to
someone else.
Refer It
If possible, delegate the
message to someone else. Sending it on to a colleague with greater knowledge or
expertise in that area is preferable. I track those more important referrals to
follow-up on later by dropping a note into a folder marked with the person’s
name to whom I referred the item. If I cannot refer the message to someone
else, then I take care of it myself.
Act on It
Place all messages that
require an action from you into one or more action folders. If you couldn't decide what to do with a message, add it to these folders as well. After all,
actions include decisions that must be made. Devise a method for pinpointing
the top-priority items. I create the folders with “handle by dates” so I don’t
miss an important deadline. The last step is to “just do it” because when you
let it pile up it takes even longer to catch up.
File It
Once the item has been
acted upon, it is time to sort and file it. Mark the messages that can be
discarded with a date—three months, six months, or a year. One trick I use for
filing is to sort the items into smaller, related stacks as I place them in the
“to be filed” stack. I set aside a time once a month to do my filing as well.
As you learn to apply this
technique to your incoming messages, you will find this system saves you a lot
of time. Time that can be better spent doing other things you want to do!
Why Give Time Management
Training to Your People
There is a lot of wasted
time throughout a person’s day. A lot of wasted life too. With a time managing
training course, you won’t have to deal with the stress of every day deadlines.
You will have everything under control – from personal to professional life. A
training program (or workshop) can assist you become more proactive and less
reactive. It will also help you get the maximum out of your daily routine.
Are you a company manager?
Time management is one tool
to success. When your people manage their time wisely and efficiently you will
see increases both in production and profits.
Wasting time lowers
productivity, decreases profits, and fails a business. Have your people trained
in time management because most people don’t know how to properly manage their
time. Give your people the tools they need to find success for themselves and
for your business.
Let me suggest three ways
to make your time management training successful.
- Try to involve everyone. No one likes to be singled out. Even if there are only a few people wasting time, make time management training mandatory for all people. Understand that time management in the workplace is everyone’s concern. Do you have 2000 people? That must be a great problem. But the greater problem is to have at least/most one-tenth of them wasting an hour everyday simply because they lack the know-how of time management.
- Invest a day in time management training. Unfortunately, very few wage earners would want to work overtime for a time management workshop. True, we can argue that attending one is for their benefit. However, most time wasters don’t understand this. Some managers don’t want to sacrifice productivity for one-day training. Let’s use a little of common sense here. A time-waster who wastes an hour everyday is wasting 20 hours in a month (given five-day work) and 140 hours in a year. That must be more than 17 days of wasted productivity. If you are a time manager, you know that most time-wasters work only for 3 out of 8 hours work. Go figure the numbers!
- Make time management training creative, interesting, and easy to understand. There are a lot of training materials that are published for businesses that are just simply boring. They are dull and uninteresting and are completely incapable of keeping the attention of people. The same is true with some facilitators. They lecture all day as if knowing time management will make the participants effective time managers. If you are to handle the training yourself, personalize your material. Sell the benefits to them by using concrete examples. Get to the point. Your participants must appreciate how your company is investing for their personal and professional growth. Use a little of your own creativity to make the lessons fun and more interesting. The training may revolutionize your business, but it is useless if no one pays attention. Putting some creative effort into the material will also let your people know that you are serious about time management training, and it will make them want to take it seriously as well. Now, if you think that hiring a facilitator is your next best option, get somebody who is willing to customize the training based on your company’s need, and one who will conduct the training based on three P’s.
What are the 3 P’s?
When giving your people
time management training, always remember the three P’s; pertinent,
practical, and polished.
The information must be
pertinent to what is going on in your workplace. Consulting books is okay, but
don’t depend on any. The solution to the problem in the workplace is always in
the workplace. Believe me, workshop participants (well, most of them) know the
importance of time management and must have read many articles on the subject.
Often times, they know how to solve the problem. Encourage them to tell you
how. I always do in my workshops. And always participants are surprised of how
much they know.
Present practical ways for
people to practice time management. I am a believer of active learning. Participants
learn better if you will provide practice during the training, clarify issues,
and affirm the correct practices they already do.
Make your presentation
polished and professional. A polished presentation will keep your people
excited about the training, make them more apt to implement positive changes,
and will boost the productivity of your business. I say, make all of your
presentations polished ones. Doing so will make your people see that you are
truly serious about your time management training.
Again, simply knowing the
benefits of time management training will not bring you anything. Only action
will make your goals come true.
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