How are you doing on time management these days? Need help? Tanushree Podder tells you how to prioritise right.
Time is money and yet money can’t buy time. Today, you’ll find you have numerous demands on your limited time. So you try to effectively manage your life, but get so obsessed with it that you spend more time prioritising than actually doing stuff.
What you actually need to work on first are things that make you dawdle:
* Indecision: Think about it, put it off, think about it, worry about it... the cycle continues.
* Inefficiency: Jumping in and implementing, instead of analysing and planning the tasks first.
* Unanticipated interruptions that don’t pay off: It happens all the time. We set out to do something and someone drops in or the telephone rings.
* Procrastination: Failing to get things done when they need to be done. * Unrealistic time estimates: You think a task will take just a few minutes, but it takes much longer.
* Unnecessary errors: You don’t have enough time to do it right, but you have enough to do it again?
* Poor organisation: Organising power plays a crucial role in stemming wastage of time.
* Ineffective meetings: Numerous meetings with no results are the bane of effective time-usage.
* Micro-management: Failure to let others perform and grow. Delegation is the key to time management. * Doing urgent rather than important tasks: Is your priority right?
EFFECTIVE TIME SAVERS * Manage the decision-making process, not the decisions.
* Concentrate on doing only one task at a time.
* Establish daily, short-term, mid-term and long-term priorities. Handle mail and e-mail quickly by writing short and crisp notes.
* Establish personal deadlines and ones for the organisation.
* Don’t waste other people’s time.
* Ensure all meetings have a purpose, a time limit and include only essential people.
* Know when to stop a task, policy and procedure.
A SIMPLE PLAN * Getting started: Stop procrastinating. Start the task right away.
* Get into a routine: Mindless routine may curb your creativity, but do it right and it won’t feel like a rut. Choose a time to get certain tasks accomplished, such as answering mail, making calls or completing paperwork. And stick to that.
* Learn to say ‘no’: You’ve read enough books on this, and heard it enough times. It’s now your turn to practise it.
* Don’t put unnecessary effort into a project: There is a time and place for perfectionism. There comes a stage in projects when there’s not much to be gained from putting extra effort.
* Divide large tasks: It’s easier to do something bit by bit than take it on whole.
* Deal with it once and for all: You often start a task, think about it, and then put it aside. Instead, start on it and get it over with.
Photograph: Jitu Savlani Model: Tejaswani Malkani