Time Management Importance and implementation

Time management help to invest time more productively and efficiently. Time management includes making a list, and then allocating time to each task from to-do list, and then scheduling those tasks in calendar. Time management is the effective use of time that prepares to plan day in such a way that work is finished, and one doesn’t have to make extra effort.

When we’re lacking good time management skills, we are more likely to,

  • Miss project deadlines
  • Produce low-quality work
  • Disrupt our work-life balance
  • Feel more stressed
  • Harm our professional reputation

Why is time Management Important

Time management is important in everyday life because it helps control workday so one can build business with effective work-life balance.

      1. Improve performance

Time management helps to focus on the essential task only. When followed a schedule, it is more likely to spend less time deciding what to work on. And hence can allocate more time to important work.

      1. Produce Better Work

When there is no pressure and one has already made a schedule that how the work shall proceed, the work output shall be more efficiency and consistent. And the end results shall be appreciated by all.

      1. Deliver work on time

Properly managing time involves managing every task on list to a specific block of time. Many people take several days to complete a project or finish it ahead of the due date to provide a buffer for any challenges that might arise. If properly scheduled, the time needed to complete work will be able to hit deadlines every time.

      1. Reduce Your Stress

This is one of the most important reasons to manage time in today’s corporate world. There is a lot of stress because of work. If time is properly managed and you are giving your deliverables on time Prioritizing tasks and giving yourself enough time to accomplish them can help reduce stress levels.

The 4 Ds of Time Management 

  1. Do

One should work on tasks that only take a few minutes to complete like answering a phone call or reverting to a phone call, answering an email, or printing a report.

  1. Defer (Delay)

Avoid wasting time on tasks that are not important as to now prioritize the task that needs to be done first.

  1. Delegate

Reassign important tasks to someone else to check their creditability and check whether they will be able to do these tasks in near future or not.

  1. Delete

Remove unnecessary tasks from schedule and focus on the important ones. This involves conscious call.

What are Time Management skills?

 Time management skills are those skills, when horned can help with time effectiveness and achieve desired results. These can help allocate time properly and complete your task more efficiently in time bound manner. Some of the most important skills related to successful time management include:

  1. Being Organized

Being organized helps you to keep track of your responsibilities and priorities, like what you need to do first and what you can take up to do last. An organized list of tasks acts as a map to guide from morning to evening and helps increase your productivity.

  1. Prioritization

Prioritization is the key to successful time management when you start prioritization your daily task. You will ensure that the most important task should be completed first. 

  1. Planning

Planning is the core of time management. With a proper plan, you can prioritize your tasks accordingly, which can help avoid confusion and unnecessary stress. A planned work schedule helps you complete the tasks in the given time frame.

  1. Delegation

It is an important process to manage multiple tasks. While managing a project/other Important work, you can delegate some of the tasks to your subordinates. This will help in reducing your workload so that you can focus more on important tasks, such as planning, business analysis, and others.

 

How could time management be crucial to your business?

  • It can help in sticking to deadlines.
  • Time management can often improve focus and overall efficiency.
  • Better time management can lead to fewer Problems.
  •  Good time management can lead to less stress and more freedom.
  • Time management is easier now than ever before.

 

Conclusion

Good time management helps to maintain control in life. When one start managing your time, immediate and quantitative impact can be evident. When you have control of your time, you feel more in control of your life — having control of your life gives you power and freedom, and time management helps you maintain this control.

Reference

An introduction to Project Management  

A project is any temporary initiatives or tasks taken up to achieve specific goal by creating unique product, service or result. A project need to fulfill the set goal(s) and for any project to be successful, proper Project Management is required. Any project start with assigning the project manager, who is responsible for leading and completing the project by addressing important questions, sketching out the scope and goal of project and importantly communicating and setting realist objectives to achieve in a timely manner. Project manager is also responsible for timely monitoring and identifying any gaps or critical pathway to ensure all deliverable are being met and project is moving towards closure.

Any good project management involves balancing the three most fundamental factor, i.e., Scope, Time and Cost. All three are dependent, as any change in any one of the parameter result in changes to the other. Any project has following phases

  1. Initiation: Laid down the foundation of project with scope, issues, resource and overall broad timeline and expected budget.
  2. Planning: Important phase t define detailed tasks, timelines and making staterg to make project successful.
  3. Execution: Working on the planned statergy to bring project on ground.
  4. Monitoring and Control: Monitoring all the plans and works being executed to have successful project. Control measures are taken by project Manager to resolve the gaps which are occurring during the execution phase
  5. Closure: Once all deliverables have been achieved which were defined during the project initiation stage and fomally handover to client satisfaction, one can say the project has been closed.

  1. Work Breakdown Structure: For Scope

 When a project starts, major focus is to achieve set goals. Often it is missed that to achieve any goal number of tasks need to be completed.

For an instance, when goal is to build a house there are major and minor tasks which need to be completion to achieve the set goal

  • Civil work (foundation laying, brick wall, plastering, painting, tiling etc.)
  • Mechnical (Water storage tank, plumbing, fittings etc)
  • Electrical (Conduit, Main Meter, Lighting and fittings etc)
  • And other works

Major point is missing any task during project can lead to unfinished/unsatisfactory work, hindering the smooth project closure. For that Work breakdown structure is used. Where work are divided into smaller tasks which helps in the monitoring and easy execution of work.

  1. Project Schedule and Timelines

 Once the scope has been broken down into smaller tasks, it is important to set duration for each smaller task and to set them in a manner that they are trackable and not exceeding the set overall project timelines. To do this in any project

  • Estimate the duration of each task
  • Add realistic buffer timeline
  • Put task in sequesnce of their occurnace during the project and link them basis there dependency to each other.
  • Assign start and End dates to each task

  1. Human Resources

Apart from planning budget, scope and time – resource management plays important role in the successful completion of work. While a project is formed, resources are alloated to project manager. Project Manager is responsible for defining the needed resource by estimating the efforts needed, validate resource availability and define roles and responsibility of each to attacin the target. RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) Matrix is one common approach for managing larger size projects involving more people.

  1. Risk Planning

In real time, unpredictable events can happen which can lead to project stagnation, like loss, injury, or other unavoidable circumstances and all these are considered as risk in project. These risk can be extended to cost, time, scope, quality etc. Project Manager is to identify the project risk, analyze it and develop risk mitigation strategies to avoid them.

  1. Conclusion

 

Project management is a very vast topic and this topic only gives a brief idea on the project management. Project success depends on the experience of Project manager to handle the project along with his/her expertise to use the various project management tools.

6. Reference

 

Situational Leadership

1. The slow and steady wins the race.

Yes, we all know and understand this quote like it’s common sense. But wait, actions create value, not words, not knowledge. Did we ever take a moment off to introspect whether we are really enacting this principle? Do we consciously allocate tasks, in our multi-tasking life, in “slow and steady” deserving category and rest? Or are we just steadily slow in all the work we do, and paradoxically regard our inefficiency as a core competency. Of course, we don’t have the time to think and answer these “unproductive questions”, and “results” are what matter in the end. We don’t want to be the slow turtles, we want to be fiery tigers, don’t we?

Results matter, but when logic and systematic thinking is betrayed, chaos is the dead end. Like a Ponzi scheme, the ride up is extremely cheerful. Unless we understand WHY we are doing it, knowing WHAT and HOW we are doing it, is like boating with the stream with no oars. Once the stream turns turbulent, we are helpless. Devoid of options and logic, we blame the waters, we rue the spent years it took to build the boat, and we pray that we don’t end up in a waterfall. And therefore, being Slow and Steady means being in command, with long term objective in sight, aligned short term objectives, and actions to back all of it. Being slow and steady means knowing 20% tasks which matter the most, and concentrating 80% of our energy and efforts on those.

Sometimes we wonder this quote is to idealistic, probably applicable up to the Utopian world of high school and college, and much too distant in the real world chaos. Early space travel had a probability of one failure every nine attempts. Before the successful Apollo 11, out of a total of 71 recognized attempts made, 70% failed in their missions. Had the scientist not followed a logical & systematic approach, out of the 41 missions after Apollo 11, 31 would not have been successful.

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, WhatsApp, and similar are called disruptive technologies; they disrupted the existing game and the playing field. Therefore, to achieve success we must first identify our game and our playing field, and then selectively take up only those activities which positively disrupt our chances of success, rest all are distractions.

2. Fast and consistent will always beat the slow and steady.

It is good to be slow and steady, but it is better to be fast and consistent. Being fast and consistent allows for immensely greater value creation from the same set of resources, compared to being slow and steady. It demands greater focus, unrelenting attitude, and efficient diligence while managing and minimizing the risks. A well executed fast and consistent approach leads to definite differential gains, unlike say stock markets, where again we are boating with no oars.

Fortunately, the 21st century is intrinsically fast. Technology has made every task faster, except may be sleeping – one still needs a good sustainable eight hour sleep. 90% of tasks are automatically and repetitively done by machines, we only need plan, organize resources, and ensure the whole system is up and running. However, a consequence of majority of tasks getting automated is that, we end up with a very minor scope for making mistakes. And therefore, unfortunately, the learning curve to becoming consistent has turned quite steep, and the path of consistency has very low margin for error.

A gradual and sustainable path to becoming consistent is, putting our 100% efforts in the job or not doing the job at all. When we give our best, we end up understanding our weaknesses and improvement areas. When we give our best, we never regret our actions, whether we end up with success or failure. Absence of regret & negativity alchemises into positive and confident attitude, with sharper, insightful and pro-active instincts. And finally we end up with the secret elements of becoming consistent; by being insightful and pro-active in our thoughts and actions.

3. First identify your core competency and then change the playing field to suit your core competency.

In the early days of Google Docs, Microsoft was (and still is) the world leader in Document Editing Software (DES) business. Microsoft had the most advanced suite of software (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Project, Note, etc.) built over expertise and experience of more than 15 years. Clearly capturing the market segment and creating a revenue stream by developing a new DES, superior and better than Microsoft Suite, was an unrealistic task. DES was undoubtedly Microsoft’s core competency and not Google’s.

So Google identified their own core competency, i.e. Gmail User Base. They developed a simple document editing interface, integrated it with their existing email-portal, and offered it free of cost to its entire user base, wherein Microsoft was charging $100 per user per year. They literally changed the game: revenue from advertising, not from software, and the playing field: their own huge user base, not Microsoft’s. Today, Google has Google Docs user base of 120 million, and substantial market share of cloud services as well.

What we can learn from this anecdote is, despite the individual brilliance we may possess, instead of trying to do everything, identifying one’s core competency and building upon it is the sure-shot ladder to success, as no one else can match it or do it better. Being jack of all trades is great in early part of one’s career, but to climb higher places we must become master of some.

4. It’s good to be individually brilliant and to have strong core competencies, but unless you are able to work in a team and harness each other’s core competencies, you will always perform below par because there will always be situations at which you will do poorly and someone else does well.

Being good or better at something/ multiple things spins off, more often than not, into an illogical conclusion that we can do everything, as good as others if not better. This becomes extremely counter-productive in a team environment when we stop acknowledging the competencies of individuals. On one hand, the disillusioned super-competitive individual gets loaded with far more work than he can manage, eventually damaging his performance in his core-competency field as well. On the other hand, the apparently competency-less individual labors on, without motivation or desire to perform, and ends up with inferior results.

The very contrasting nature of 20th and 21st century compared to earlier times has been, One-Man-Shows/ One-Man-Army concepts don’t work now; scope and complexity of work has gone beyond capacity of a single individual. Even artists need outsourced expertise of sales, marketing, IT support, etc. to make a living. Nevertheless, to turn a blind eye to a blatant fact is another unique human capacity. The hierarchical nature of organizations, categorizing people into managers, executives, officers, etc. worsens the whole problem even further. However, we are now also seeing various start-ups and large companies working with a flat structure and avoiding the kingly-times hierarchical setup, wherein justifiably discipline was foremost requirement.

Situational leadership is the leadership style that produces results most effectively and efficiently in today’s world. It encompasses knowing the strengths, weakness, and potential of the team members, and timely empowering the most suitable person to take lead, basis need of the hour. Even though the internet age and education industry has made information and human resources abundant and cheap, managing stakeholders, scope/ time/ cost/ quality constraints, and extracting the right results via a finite set of people is more challenging than ever. Adopting Situational Leadership is the need of the hour.