Time Management Essay Example for Free

era forethought Essay clock age Management skills ar ingrained for successful people these argon the practical techniques which hire serviceed the leading people in business, sport and globe service r apiece the pinnacles of their c bers.The 8020 RuleThis is neatly summed up in the Pareto Principle, or the 8020 Rule. This argues that typically 80% of unfocussed case generates plainly 20% of results. The remaining 80% of results are achieved with only 20% of the effort. While the ratio is not always 8020, this broad pattern of a micro proportion of action mechanism generating non-scalar returns recurs so frequently as to be the norm in many an separate(prenominal) areas. If you work for an organization, calculate how much you cost it apiece year. Include your salary, payroll taxes, the cost of office seat you occupy, equipment and facilities you habit, expenses, administrative support, etc. If you are self-employed, work the annual running costs of your busines s.If you work normal hours, you bequeath substantiate approximately 200 harvest- mive days each year. If you work 7 hours each day, this equates to 1,500 hours in a year. From these figures, calculate an hourly rate. This should give a reasonable estimate of how much your season is cost this may be a surprisingly large amount When you are deciding whether or not to dole out a t collect on, think somewhat this value are you wasting your or your organizations resources on a low yield tax? ________________________________________ in-person Time Management for Busy Managersby Gerard M BlairTime passes, apace. This article looks at the basics of PersonalTime Management and describes how the Manager can tire control of this basic resource.The do wordsThe tether Eff words are concise OEDEffective having a definite or desired effectEfficient harvest-tideive with minimum pay off or effortEffortless seemingly without effort natural, easyPersonal Time Management is about win ning the Eff words making them apply to you and your daily routines.What is Personal Time Management?Personal Time Management is about controlling the social function of your most priceless (and undervalued) resource. Consider these two questions what would happen if you washed-out play a keen-sighted money with as few safeguards as you occur union metre, when was the last time you scheduled a review of your time allocation? The absence of Personal Time Management is characterized by last atomic number 42 rushes to meet dead-lines, meetings which are either double booked or achieve nothing, days which seem somehow to slip unproductively by, crises which loom unexpected from nowhere. This sort of environment leads to inordinate stress and degradation of motion it essential be hitchped. Poor time management is often a symptom of over authority techniques which employ to work with small projects and workloads are simply re employd with large ones.But inefficiencies which were insignificant in the small role are ludicrous in the large. You can not drive a motor rhythm like a bicycle, nor can you manage a supermarket-chain like a market stall. The demands, the problems and the payoffs for increased talent are all larger as your responsibility grows you must learn to apply proper techniques or be in end pointited by those who do. Possibly, the reason Time Management is poorly practised is that it so seldom forms a measured part of appraisal and performance review what many fail to foresee, however, is how intimately it is connected to aspects which do. Personal Time Management has many facets.Most motorbuss recognize a few, except few recognize them all. thither is the honest concept of keeping a well ordered diary and the related idea of plan activity. But beyond these, it is a tool for the systematic ordering of your influence on events, it underpins many other managerial skills such as Effective Delegation and Project Planning. Personal Time Management is a set of tools which allow you to eliminate wastage be prepared for meetings refuse excessive workloads proctor project upgrade divvy up resource (time) appropriate to a tasks importance ensure that hanker term projects are not neglected plan each day efficiently plan each week effectively and to do so simply with a little self-discipline.Since Personal Time Management is a management make for just like any other, it must be planned, monitored and regularly reviewed. In the followingsections, we allow for experience the basic methods and functions of Personal Time Management. Since true understanding depends upons experience, you impart be asked to take part by looking at aspects of your own work. If you do not have time to this right now ask yourself why not? Current PracticeWhat this article is advocating is the adoption of certain practices which will give you great control over the use and allocation of your primary resource time. Before we start on the f uture, it is charge considering the present. This involves the simplistic task of keeping a note of how you spend your time for a suitably long period of time (say a week). I say simplistic since all you have to do is take a leak a simple table, photocopy half-a-dozen copies and carry it well-nigh with you filling in a row both time you change activity. After one week, allocate time (start as you mean to go on) to reviewing this log. countervail DisposalWe are not looking here to create overbold categories of work to enhance faculty (that comes later) but simply to eliminate wastage in your current practice. The average IEE Chartered Engineer earns about 27,000 pounds per annum about 12.50 pounds per hour, say 1 pound every 5 minutes for how many 5 minute sections of your activity would you have paid a pound? The first step is a critical appraisal of how you spend your time and to question some of your habits. In your time log, identify periods of time which might have been bet ter used. There are various sources of waste. The most common are social telephone calls, friends dropping by, conversations around the coffee machine. It would be foolish to eliminate all non-work related activity (we all need a break) but if its a choice between chatting to Harry in the good afternoon and meeting the nigh pay-related deadline Your time log will show you if this is a problem and you might like to do something about it originally your boss does.In your time log, look at each work activity and set objectively how much time each was worth to you, and compare that with the time you unquestionablely spent on it. An afternoon spent polishing an internal memo into a Pulitzer prize winning piece of provocative prose is waste an hour spent debating the leaving present of a colleague is waste a minute spent sorting out the paper-clips is waste (unless relaxation). This type of activity will be reduced naturally bymanaging your own time since you will not allocate time t o the trivial. Specifically, if you have a task to do, determine before hand how long it should take and work to that deadline indeed move on to the next task. some other common source of waste stems from delaying work which is unpleasant by finding distractions which are less chief(prenominal) or unproductive. Check your log to see if any tasks are being delayed simply because they are dull or difficult. Time is often wasted in changing between activities. For this reason it is profitable to group similar tasks together thus avoiding the start-up delay of each. The time log will show you where these nest egg can be made. You may want thence to initiate a routine which deals with these on a fixed but regular basis.Doing Subordinates WorkHaving considered what is complete waste, we now turn to what is scarcely inappropriate. Often it is simpler to do the job yourself. Using the stamp machine to frank your own letters ensures they leave by the next post writing the missing summ ary in the latest get along report from your junior is more(prenominal) pleasant than sending it back (and it lets you choose the emphasis). Rubbish Large gains can be made by assigning secretarial duties to secretaries they regularly catch the next post, they type a lot faster than you. Your overcome should be told about the missing section and told how (and why) to slant it. If you have a task which could be through with(p) by a subordinate, use the next occasion to start training him/her to do it instead of doing it yourself you will need to spend some time monitoring the task thereafter, but far less that in doing it yourself.Doing the work of OthersA major pertain upon your work can be the tendency to help others with theirs. Now, in the spirit of an open and harmonious work environment it is obviously desirable that you should be willing to help out but check your work log and decide how much time you spend on your own work and how much you spend on others. For instance , if you spend a morning checking the grammar and spelling in the training material related to you last project, then that is waste. Publications should do the proofreading, that is their job, they are better at it than you are you should deal at the technical level. The remaining problem is your manager.Consider what periods in yourwork log were used to perform tasks that your manager either repeated or simply negated by ignoring it or redefining the task, too late. making your manager efficient is a very difficult task, but where it impinges upon your work and performance you must take the bull by the horns (or whatever) and confront the issue. Managing your manager may seem a long way from Time Management but no one impacts upon your use of time more than your immediate superior.If a task is ill defined seek clarification (is that a one page summary or a ten page report?). If seemingly random alterations are asked in your deliverables, ask for the reasons and next time clarify t hese and similar points at the beginning. If the manager is difficult, try writing a small specification for each task before beginning it and have it chalk upd. While you can not tactfully hold your manager to this contract if he/she has a change of mind, it will at least cause him/her to consider the issues first on, before you waste your time on false assumptions.External AppointmentsThe next stage of Personal Time Management is to start taking control of your time. The first problem is appointments. Start with a simple appointments diary. In this book you will have (or at least should have) a complete list of all your cognise appointments for the foreseeable future. If you have omitted your regular ones (since you remember them anyway) add them now. Your appointments constitute your interaction with other people they are the agreed interface between your activities and those of others they are determined by international obligation. They often fill the diary. Now, be ruthles s and eliminate the unnecessary. There may be committees where you can not productively contribute or where a subordinate might be (better) able to participate. There may be long lunches which could be better run as short conference calls. There may be interviews which last three times as long as necessary because they are scheduled for a whole hour. steal the wastage starting today. The next stage is to add to your diary lists of other, personal activity which will enhance your use of the uncommitted time. Consider what is the most important type of activity to add to your diary? No- stop reading for a moment and really, consider. The single most important type of activity is those which will proceed you time allocate time to save time, a stitch in time saves days. And most significantly of all,always allocate time to time management at least five minutes each and every day. For each appointment left in the diary, consider what actions you might take to ensure that no time is was ted plan to avoid work by being prepared.Thus, if you are going to a meeting where you will be asked to comment on some report, allocate time to read it so avoiding delays in the meeting and increasing your chances of making the right decision the first time. Consider what actions need to be done before AND what actions must be done to follow-up. Even if the latter is unclear before the event, you must still allocate time to review the outcome and to plan the resulting action. Simply mark in your diary the block of time necessary to do this and, when the time comes, do it.Scheduling ProjectsThe most daunting external appointments are deadlines often, the handover of deliverables. Do you leave the work too late? Is there commonly a last-place panic towards the end? Are the last few hectic hours often marred by errors? If so, use Personal Time Management. The basic idea is that your management of personal deadlines should be achieved with exactly the selfsame(prenominal) techniques you would use in a large project check the specification are you sure that you agree on what is to be delivered break the task down into small sections so that you can estimate the time needful for each, and monitor progress schedule reviews of your progress (e.g. after each sub-task) so that you can respond quickly to difficulties Like most management ideas, this is common sense. Some people, however, refute it because in practise they find that it merely shows the lack of time for a project which must be done anyway.This is simply daft If simple project supply and time management show that the task can not be done, then it will not be done but by knowing at the start, you have a chance to do something about it. An impossible deadline affects not only your success but also that of others. mean a product is scheduled for release too soon because you agree to deliver too early. market and Sales will prepare customers to expect the product showing why they really need it but it will not arrive.The customers will be dissatisfied or even lost, the competition will have advanced warning, and all because you agreed to do the impossible. You can avoid this type of problem. By practising time management, you will always have a clear understanding of how you spend your time and what time isunallocated. If a new task is thrust upon you, you can estimate whether it is practical. The project preparedness tells you how much time is needed and the time management tells you how much time is available. There are four ways to deal with impossible deadlines attract the deadline extendedScream for more resourcesGet the Deliverable redefined to something practicalState the position clearly so that your boss (and his/her boss) have fair warning If this simple approach seems unrealistic, consider the alternative. If you have an imposed, but unobtainable, deadline and you tackle it then the outcome is your assured failure. Of course, there is a fifth option move to a compan y with realistic schedules. One defence tactic is to present your superior with a current list of your obligations indicating what impact the new task will have on these, and ask him/her to assign the priorities I cant do them all, which should I slip?. Another tactic is to keep a data base of your time estimates and the real(a) time taken by each task.This will quickly develop into a source of valuable data and increase the accuracy of your planning predictions. There is no reason why you should respond only to externally imposed deadlines. The slightly shoddy product which you hand-over after the last minute rush (and normally have returned for correction the following week) could easily have been polished if only an extra day had been available so move your personal deadline forward and allow yourself the luxury of leisured review before the product is shipped.Taking this a step further, the same sort of review might be applied to the product at each stage of its development so that errors and rework time are reduced. Thus by allocating time to quality review, you save time in rework and this is all part of project planning supported and monitored by your time management. Finally, for each activity you should estimate how much time it is worth and allocate only that amount. This critical appraisal may even suggest a different approach or method so that the time matches the tasks importance. Beware of perfection, it takes too long allocate time for fitness for purpose, then stop.Monitoring StaffYour Personal Time Management also affects other people, particularly your subordinates. Planning projects mover not only allocating your time but also the distribution of tasks and this should be done in the same planned, monitored and reviewed manner as your own scheduling. Any delegated task should be specified with an (agreed) end date. As a Manager, you are responsible for ensuring that the tasks allocated to your subordinates are completed successfully. Thus you should ensure that each task is concluded with a deliverable (for instance, a memo to confirm completion) you make an entry in your diary to check that this has arrived. Thus, if you agree the task for Tuesday, Wednesday should have an entry in your diary to check the deliverable. This simple device allows you to monitor progress and to initiate action as necessary.Long term ObjectivesThere are many long term objectives which the good Manager must achieve, particularly with regard to the development, support and motivation of his/her work-team. Long term objectives have the problem of being important but not urgent they do not have deadlines, they are distant and remote. For this reason, it is all too easy to ignore them in favour of the urgent and immediate. Clearly a balance must be struck. The beauty of Time Management is that the balance can be headstrong objectively (without influence from immediate deadlines) and self-imposed through the use of the diary. Simply, a mana ger might decide that one hour a week should be devoted to personnel issues and would then allocate a regular block of time to that activity.Of course if the factory is on fire, or World War cardinal is declared, the manager may have to re-allocate this time in a particular week but proscribe such crises, this time should then become sacrosanct and always applied to the same, designated purpose. Similarly, time may be allocated to staff development and training. So if one afternoon a month is deemed to be a satisfactory allocation, then simply designate the second Thursday (say) of each month and delegate the choice of speakers.The actual time spent in managing this sort of long term objective is small, but without that deliberate planning it will not be achieved. Once you have implemented Personal Time Management, it is worth victimisation some of that control to augment your own career. Some quiet weekend, you should sketch out your own long term objectives and plan a route t o them. As you would any long term objective,allocate time to the necessary sub-tasks and monitor your progress. If you do not plan where you want to go, you are unlikely to get there. cerebrate Remarks.Personal Time Management is a systematic application of common sense strategies. It requires little effort, barely it promotes efficient work practices by highlighting wastage and it leads to effective use of time by focusing it on your chosen activities. Personal Time Management does not solve your problems it reveals them, and provides a structure to implement and monitor solutions. It enables you to take control of your own time how you use it is then up to you.