Time Management

                                     -BY S SANJAY RAM

ABOUT

Time management is the process of organizing and planning to divide your time for activities to be achieved in a specific amount of time. Good time management enables you to work smarter – so that you get a greater number of tasks done in less time.

Everyone has 24 hours in their day, but the number of tasks varies for each person, some people might take more time to complete a task for perfection. Every person works according to his capability that’s where time management kicks in, it’s not about the working hours it’s about efficiency.

With effective time management, you can take control of your time and get on top of your to-do list. Get started by having a look at how good your time management skills are right now. It's always difficult, to begin with, but once you are familiar with your skills and strengths it goes a long way. The best thing to do is to do a SWOT analysis which will help you to know about yourself and you can overcome your obstacles by dealing with your weakness.

Then dive right into the core skills of time management: prioritization, scheduling, and focus. Explore the historical theories that approach time management to understand what's right for you. You must deal with some common time management challenges such as lateness, deadline and interruptions. Finally, inspire yourself by learning how to set goals, and discover what it is that motivates you.

High achievers are not born productive. Rather, they've learned and practised the skills needed to get more done in less time. Productivity is not a talent. It's a learned skill that every individual will need to develop. Everyone can’t be a high achiever but giving your best to every task, by being persistent one can achieve more than they think they are capable of.

Ways to Increase daily productivity:

There are many articles, blogs, videos available on the internet including this one! which will suggest ways to improve your productivity. But every person is different, everyone works according to their potential. Here are some ways to improve/ increase your daily productivity.

1   Set a goal/ Have a purpose

The first step in effective time management is keeping your eye on the prize, the aim of your task should be set by you. The clearer you are about what it is you want to achieve the easier it will be to ignore the distractions that don’t contribute to the accomplishment of your goals, don’t think about other things. To implement this time management technique, start by sitting down and giving a bit of deep thought about what drives you.

Ask yourself these questions:  What are you passionate about? What goals do you want to achieve?

Once you answer those questions, begin to break the resulting goal into a smaller task. This is your first step in effective time management.

2.     Start working on your goal. 

When you begin to act on the goals you want to accomplish and the things you are passionate about it leaves little room for distraction. It will be difficult to do anything systematic in the beginning but once you get a hang of it you will go a long way!

Throw away the excuses. Stop waiting for the perfect time to get started. Don’t become complacent in your daily life, identify the things that drive you and go for them. Always remember something is better than nothing.

3.  Stop procrastinating!

Procrastination is the biggest enemy in time management, dragging thing to the last moment often decrease the amount of productivity as the tasks/jobs are piled up, which gives room for pressure and unnecessary frustration and if the job isn’t finished, we will regret postponing our tasks.

But don’t stop fighting yet. What you probably need to do is refine your methods of combating procrastination. Procrastination robs you of your time and energy.

4.   Eliminate interruptions

Interruptions are one of the biggest obstacles to your productivity. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine revealed that the average office worker is interrupted every three minutes and five seconds on average. The most shocking part… It can take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to completely regain your focus and get back to where you started! With that fact in mind, it’s clear that limiting interruptions as much as possible is a time management hack that will drastically increase your productivity.

So immediately eliminate all the obvious distractions. Turn your phone to do not disturb mode, find a quiet place to work, and put a do not disturb sign on your door if needed. It is not easy for us to eliminate all the interruptions as our brain itself goes against us. No matter in whichever situation you are the brain is capable to take you to the past, sometimes you think of bad memories which might help the present by not making the same mistakes. In such situations, we must control our thoughts and shouldn’t get carried away by them.

5.    Stop multitasking

This might surprise you, but research has shown that multitasking does not lead to productivity! It decreases productivity as our brain constantly shifts from one task to another which eventually leads to us not concentrating on the task. Productivity does not imply doing more tasks it means doing a task with full concentration to avoid mistakes or doing a job perfectly as possible.

These are the key points which should be looked upon:

• When you multitask what you’re doing is making your brain rapidly switch from one task to another. Which has been shown to negatively impact your efficiency.
• When you rapidly switch from one task to the next you don’t allow yourself to “get in the zone” on either task which can drastically lower the quality of your work.
• Since you don’t allow yourself to “get in the zone” when you try to complete two or more tasks at once it can take you 50% more time or longer to complete each task compared to if you focused on them
  
  
  
  

6.  Set deadlines

Having a deadline is great, it gives you the motivation to finish the task within the given time limit. When you don’t set deadlines, you open the door for procrastination. Don’t make this mistake, set tight deadlines, and stick to them. People fear to miss the deadline, change this mindset, and see the deadline as your friend who helps you to remind that there is a task that needs to be completed so that you are passionate to finish the task within the given time.

         7. Stay focused on your priorities

Creating a to-do list is a great step in increasing your productivity and time management skills. It’s essentially your road map to daily success. But what’s a map real value if you never use it? People often create an unrealistic schedule that even they know that can’t be followed. Creating a schedule is for you to do the task in an orderly way, so take baby steps, have a minimal milestone at the beginning and increase the task persistently up to a level which you are capable of. It should not be like doing more than your capacity on day 1 and then didn’t follow the schedule at all.

Maintain your daily focus on accomplishing the task on your to-do list. The more things you check off your list the closer you get to achieving your goals.

Start by completing the most important task first. Then begin working on the others.

8. Don’t make the mistake of confusing urgent with important

Urgent and important are two very different things. At some point or another people that are productive and effective at managing their time come to realize this. Make sure your to-do list separates urgent tasks from the important task, and always complete the most important tasks first.

Urgent tasks are mostly tasks that have an immediate deadline or a deadline that has passed. These urgent tasks don't need to be time-consuming or effort-intensive. It is also not necessary that these tasks will have a significant impact on your life they may be very trivial or silly. Most often things become urgent, or an urgent situation is created when a person always knows that something had to be accomplished but kept deferring it or procrastinating it.

Short points for urgent tasks:

1. Urgency of a task is largely governed by deadlines whereas the importance of a task is decided by the impact or significant change it can have on your life
2. Urgency is driven by external factors like deadlines whereas importance is more of an introspective exercise. What you consider important can differ from what others consider important.

9. Write things down

If you don’t write down your thoughts, you will likely forget them. We have all been there. So, make sure you take notes of new ideas, notes about your business, and things you’ve learned.

Smart Phones has a note app installed on it and you probably use it frequently. However, don’t use this app to use the traditional pen and paper method, because studies have shown that when you write notes with pen and paper, you are more likely to remember and retain the information due to the way your brain processes writing as compared to typing or texting.

 Writing tasks is a good habit and the joy of ticking the list gives you happiness and makes you feel that you have achieved something.

10. Give yourself credit

Whenever you finish a task, appreciate yourself and be motivated to do the next task, this will increase productivity and once you finish all the tasks on your to-do list you get satisfaction and happiness then you can enjoy the rest of the day! By doing this regularly you will find a change in yourself and will be able to manage your work-life balance.