“Yesterday is a cancelled cheque, Tomorrow is a promissory note, Today is ready cash. Use it." –Proverb
Everybody at sometime in their life (at least in their professional life) has made the universal comment: “I wish I had more time!” I also did, and I stand guilty as anybody else when it comes to managing my time. Time always has been a constraint to me right from my college days.
However, all I saw was despite all my machinations, the day had only 24 hours, and the week only seven days. Where was I going to find the time to do all the things I wanted? I was literally like the pup, which chases its own tail. The more I hurried the more tasks were at hand.
Then I came across the time management matrix featured in Stephen Covey's ‘Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People.’
Read my article: Time Management – A New Paradigm
A paradigm shift occurred in my understanding of time management. It wasn’t a question of trying to squeeze in 75 minutes an hour, and 30 such hours a day, it became a matter of putting first things first. It was apparent that I needed to manage energy not time and I needed to drive and not just react. I understood the dynamic interplay between the urgent and the important. Things really became clearer when I realized as Covey says that. I was a perennial inhabitant as of ‘Quadrant of Crisis’ and trying to shuttle to ‘Quadrant of Deception’. I was spending very little time in ‘Quadrant of Quality’.
I realized that if I needed to my time effectively as per this grid then by default it needed to be more in ‘Quadrant of Quality’, and my time management efforts will have a more firm foundation than trying to do the maximum tasks in the minimum possible time. I have made a conscious decision to shift to ‘Quadrant of Quality’. which entails:
-Review my mission: to connect with what is important in my life as a whole.
-Identify my roles: make a list of all the roles that they fulfill in my life.
-Create my goals: once I have defined my roles then I needed to focus on what are my goals.
-Schedule my goals: the key here was not just to prioritize the schedule but to schedule my priorities.
- Adapt my schedule: the daily task is to focus on priorities while facing unexpected opportunities and challenges that may arise. This involves responding wisely to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences.
- Evaluate my progress: needed me to turn the week into a continuous means of learning and living through a process of reflection and review.
I think I am close to mastering the art of time management. I now leave for home early everyday night………….. By 9.30 PM!!! But I am getting there.
G Ravi
Monday, November 26, 2007
My Experience With ‘Time Management’
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2 comments:
One of the most important lessons that I learnt when I was a young adult was that one can either become a slave to time and long for 48 hours in a day instead of 24 or make time one’s slave by managing it effectively. Effective time management translates into getting all your tasks planned out for the day, getting them done on time without undue stress, while leaving time for you to spend quality time with your family and/or having time left over for doing other things that you like. In today’s fast paced life this might seem like a Herculean task but it is all about disciplining yourself enough to make the most of your 24 hours without compromising on your quality of life.
A very simple way of making the most of 24 hours is to break down your tasks for the day into bite size activities, create a check-list, prioritize the activities on the list in order of importance and urgency, and check off whatever is completed as it gets done. This approach has certainly helped me manage my time better. A decade ago, just the thought of having to do so many things in the span of a day used to bog me down. All the activities together appeared like a blurry insurmountable mountain which made me utterly weary even before I set out to tackle anything for the day. This in turn made me feel nervous, tired, unhappy, and also stunted my productivity. I tried to multi task in random order without any planning, which, at the end of the day, left most of my tasks incomplete. But now, with the new approach that I have adopted over the last few years, life is so much better as I suddenly seem to magically have more time on hand!
The key to effective time management is in planning, being organized, breaking down large tasks into multiple, smaller sub-tasks that can be accomplished by taking baby steps, and having realistic goals for each day. We have just one life to live, so let’s work towards managing our time effectively so that we can enjoy what we are doing without forgetting to stop and smell the roses!
What has been so effectively described is the technique of timeboxing, a time management tool used commonly in large projects . Timeboxing is a way to chunk up time and get results. A timebox is simply a limited set of time to accomplish a result. It specifies how much work you can get done in a given block of time. Individuals can use time boxing for personal tasks too. This technique utilizes a reduced scale of time and deliverables. Personal timeboxing also works to curb perfectionist tendencies by setting a firm time and not over commit to a task. Using timeboxes helps strike balance. Timeboxes also help with pacing. If I only have so many hours to produce results, I'm very careful to spend my high energy hours on the right things.
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