Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control over the time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. The best time management techniques improve the way you work. Time management refers to the effective management of time so that the right time is allocated to the right activity. Learn more about the five steps to effective time management, viz. study, identify, analyze, decide and implement.
The time management process can be broken down into five steps:
- Studying – how much time has passed?
- Identify – where the time is wasted?
- Analyze – why is there waste?
- Decide what changes are needed?
- Implement decisions and periodically review
Now let’s see these steps in detail:
1. STUDY – Time Use Study
In order to identify the amount of time spent on various activities and how it is spent, you can keep a daily diary and plan your time and analyze how time is spent on various activities. You should also plan the hours you need to devote to various activities (daily and monthly).
The use of time studies is to systematically observe and record downtime in relation to activities that are carried out by the individuals being studied. Time recording can be done by the individual concerned himself (by keeping a detailed diary with notes on the time spent) or preferably by someone else around.
Time can be recorded to the nearest five or ten minutes. The manager should categorize all logged activities to determine what proportion of the total work time is spent on each type of activity. To get a fairly complete picture of the time-use pattern, these studies should be repeated to include daily or seasonal variations in the work pattern.
If the analysis reveals that excessive time was spent on one category and insufficient time was spent on an equally important category, the manager must take steps to correct the imbalance.
2. IDENTIFY – Identification of lost time periods
Analyzing the current time usage pattern allows a manager to identify unused periods of time to effectively achieve desired goals. These periods can be counted as time traps. In certain types of activities, the probabilities of unproductive use of time are high.
Some examples of such time-strapped activities are unproductive meetings, unplanned visitors, long periods of travel, cumbersome paperwork, and unnecessary interruptions from frequent phone calls. Unproductive meetings without a planned agenda and ineffective discussions with leaders steal a lot of productive time from workers.
3. ANALYZE – Reasons for wasting time
Underutilization of time may be due to faulty system or manager/officer/leader faults or lack of planning. Many factors can cause procrastination, such as system problems, personal work habits, lack of delegation, personality traits, poor work habits of the leader, inability to resolve conflicts interpersonal relationships, obstacles and a lack of foresight.
Read more about these reasons in the next article.
4. DECIDES – Possible corrective measures
After studying and analyzing how time is spent, why time is wasted, and where time is wasted, you need to decide what changes are needed for effective use of time. For this purpose, a large number of remedial measures can be taken by you. The first and main determinant of a planned and targeted use of time is to develop an awareness of the value of time at all levels of the organization. Goal setting planning and priority setting should be addressed immediately.
5. IMPLEMENT – Put your strategy into action
Once you have identified, analyzed and decided on the action plan, now is the time to put your plan into the implementation stage. Start working on the strategy and you will find that you are improving day by day in your time management. The best time management techniques improve your work methods, help control distractions and lock in your focus. Knowing how to spend your time, setting priorities, using scheduling tools, getting organized, planning, delegating, and avoiding procrastination, wasting time, and multitasking are essential to effective time management.
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Creation date Tuesday, October 20, 2020 Views 5054