Time Management

What is time? It is very difficult to answer and even quite difficult to manage as well.  Someone has quoted that Time management is life management and I too believe the same. Consider a scenario where you have to catch a train at 7.30 in the morning. Your home is bit far from station and you have to finish lot of stuff at home. If you are running behind schedule and reached station late by few minutes, you miss the train. If you had started early in the morning then you could have caught the train. Now, the cascaded effect will affect you throughout morning and even in some cases for the entire day as well. This is an example of bad time management and, here, we failed to manage time, rather I would say, we failed to plan well.  Time management begins with planning. There is another famous quote of Benjamin Franklin that ‘If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail’. Hope everyone is agreeing with this.

Your time is your life. If you waste your time, you are wasting your life. Take an example of successful people like our PM Mr. Narendra Modi, Business icon Mr.Ratan Tata, Narayan Murty or any other famous personality, they value their time. I have never met a successful person who didn’t value their time and I have never met an unsuccessful person who values his time.

Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each day with Rs.86400. It carries over no balance from day to day. At the end of the day, bank writes off the balance which you failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw every single rupee each day, of course!  Now this is the reality. Everyone has such a bank account. This bank is named as ‘Time Bank’ and gets a credit of 84600 seconds every day. Every night it writes off whatever is unused or failed to invest in good things. It carries over no balance. No overdraft facility or loan facility is available in this bank. Every day account will start with deposit of same amount of time and you need to make transactions with good utilization of every second. If you fail to do so, the remaining deposit will be cleaned off and that is your loss. There is no going back. You must live in the present on today’s deposit and there is no drawing against tomorrow. Don’t let other people waste your time either. Protect your time and it can never be replaced.

Now we will see the benefits of time management.

1    1)      You are more productive.

2    2)     You can reduce your stress.

3    3)     You can improve your self-esteem.

4    4)     You can achieve work life balance.

5    5)     You can accomplish your goals and targets.

Let’s look at some proven techniques of time management.

1     1)      Planning - As I mentioned earlier, planning is most important part in time management.  Plan your work well in advance. Use weekly and monthly calendar for planning.  Look ahead and anticipate deadlines and foreseeable high stress periods such as midterm, month end, deadline week. Try to complete the work or study well in advance and give some room for revisions or revisit your completed work.

2     2)     Use digital /physical organizer or to-do list.  – This will help you to track the tasks which are supposed to be finished. Also, we need to make sure that we finish everyday work and will not increase to-do list like hanuman’s tail.

3    3)      Prioritize your task - Never leave your work till tomorrow which you can do today. People often complain about lack of time and they seem very busy in their life. I would say, nobody is too busy it’s just a matter of priorities. I will give you one example at the end of this.

4     4)      Learn to say ‘No’ -  Saying ‘Yes’ is good thing but you may get into mess by saying always ‘Yes’ to work.  You should learn a smart way to say ‘No’ to keep room for your work.

5       5)      Focus – To do two things once is to do neither. Multitasking is a good skill whereas most of the time we cannot focus on either of the task at a time. So focus is more important for performing your activity and this will lead you to perfection as well.

6      6)      Block out distractions – In this digital era, mobile phone is the biggest distraction device in our daily life. We are habitual to keep on checking our mobile phones frequently. The social media notifications keep on coming and distract our working mind. The best way is turning off unnecessary notification from social media like Facebook, twitter and many more.

7    7)      Delegate - There are some people who like or wish to complete all important work on their own. But there are times when you are supposed to delegate work to your juniors, co-worker or fellow colleague. This will reduce your work load as well as get some relief from work pressure.

8     8)      Track your time spent – Time is most valuable thing a man can spend. Keep track of your work as well as time spent to complete a task. This will give you a scope to analyze your efforts. Also, you can utilize this analysis in future planning to make plans more precise and you can avoid last minute rush.

9    9)      Eliminate your time wasters – One thing you can’t recycle is wasted time. So, please do try to avoid wasting of time in useless stuffs.

1    10)   Leave buffer time in-between – When we do same type of work then we feel bored.  Even sometimes, we fail to allocate correct amount of time for our scheduled task. In such instances, buffer time can be your life saver. This will make sure that you will not mess up with your rest of the schedule and be able to finish the work correctly on time. Also, this can be utilized for relaxing and fun if time permits. This will keep you energetic, refreshing and prepare yourself for next challenge.

 Now we will move to the last story. This is small story of an experiment performed by lecturer in one of the university.  The lecturer carried a bag of pebbles, a bag of sand, some big rocks and a bucket. He asks for a volunteer to put all three types of stones in the bucket. One keen student stepped out and started putting those things in a bucket. He started with sand then the pebbles and then some big rocks, but, he failed to fit all in the bucket. Then lecturer came forward and changed the sequence. He puts big rocks first, then the small pebbles in the large empty area and rest of the empty space is filled with sand.  This is much like time management, by completing your biggest tasks first, you leave room to complete your medium tasks, then your smaller ones. In this way, you can accomplish all your tasks.

To conclude this I would say, time is your life and more valuable than money. So, please make good use of it and achieve success.