“Today, be aware of how you are spending your 1, 440 beautiful moments and spend them wisely.”
- Anonymous.
Imagine going to bed at night with the thought of having completed all tasks that you had planned in the last 1440 seconds, how will that make you feel? Needless to say, it would give you another reason for a sound sleep. Unfortunately, in real life most of us might not get so lucky, given the multitude of activities in the day we run into. For sure, you might have already tagged your boss or supervisor as “A Poor Time Manager”. But have you ever given a thought about your time management skills?
Self Assessment to know if you are suffering from time management problems:
a. Are you always on time for most of your work e.g. – going to college or office, completing assignments, attending meetings?
b. Do you always complete 100% of your work or you always have a bit pending?
c. Can you find everything you need quickly?
d. Do you start your work on time and leave work too on time?
e. Do you have time to do what you really want to do, for example –going trekking, fishing, travel?
If the answer to most of these is “no”, then this article is for you.
80/20 Principle: Pareto law: Do you know that 20% of your time produces 80% of your work, or that 20% of your work achieves 80% of results, or that 20% managers do 80% of the work? We can find examples of this everywhere. This also means that 80% of your time you should be productive and the remaining time can be for low priority work.
Here comes the ten tips.
1. Your daily activities need to be prioritized based on your goals and personal values.
2. Maintain your Time Balance Sheet Everyday:
Example:
| No of hours in a week: -168 | Planned Hours | Actual Hours | Deviated Hours |
| Sleeping | 49 | 63 | -14 |
| Eating | 10 | 14 | -4 |
| Washing / Dressing | 7 | 10 | -3 |
| Travelling | 14 | 22 | -8 |
| Family activities | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| Reading | 15 | 5 | 10 |
| Watching TV | 4 | 12 | -8 |
| Wasted in “dead time” – waiting for someone | 2 | 6 | -4 |
| Time spent in meetings/assignments/project work | 61 | 30 | 34 |
It will be a good idea to monitor your Time Balance Sheet Every week and reduce your “Deviated hours”
3. Set target for your time for all tasks:
- It is recommended to make a daily “To do” list and set target for each activity in your “To Do” list.
- You may even consider doing two things at a time wherever possible. However, make sure you don’t end up doing neither of the two.
- For complex and tedious tasks it may be a good idea to break tasks into minutes of ten.
- Leave time for correction, review and collation at the end.
- Learn to say “No” before committing to a task if needed.
4. Use Time Management tools: Setting alarms in Mobile Organizer, diary planner, Calendar etc. It may be a good idea to use checklist and split up jobs into “important”, “urgent”, etc. Despite all planning, sometime we may come under critical situations. In such cases we need to be clear and know what is at stake and change our plan accordingly.
5. Make use of transition time
What is a transition time? Transition time is the time between end of one activity and beginning of another. Example could be – waiting time for a doctor with whom you have an appointment, waiting time for a friend at the bus stop, etc. In our everyday life we may come across several such transition times. We may use the transition time to do other pending work like making a call to an important client, or replying to some email.
6. Concentration is the key! It is better to be alone for tasks that are complex and require complete attention.
7. Conquer procrastination! Remember, if you do not start, then you do not finish.
Self assessment to check if you suffer from procrastination syndrome:
a. Do you start only when deadlines are near?
b. Do you find it hard to get started?
c. Are you always short of time for getting things started?
d. Does the thought of trying to complete anything make you nervous?
e. Have you done lots of things to be done that have been carried over from previous week?
8. Use proper space management!
It is estimated that 20% of a person’s daily time in a month are wasted for searching, rearranging and filing things. Do you recall how much time you spent in searching for “that email” from your supervisor? Try to reduce paper work and duplications wherever possible. Keep your working table or study table organized. It is better to keep things most important nearby and keep a log of location of critical files.
9. Avoid information overload, Remember too much information is “overkill”. Better to focus on limited information at any point of time.
10. Last but not the least; remember to apply your common sense at all times.
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” – Buddha
Author
Rajat Pal
Editorial Team GSG & Project Manager in a reputed software company.
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