What Is Time Management?}

Submitted by: Jesslyn Reinecke

Unmanaged Time Is Not Gold!

You opened your organizer and you frowned at the long to-do list and appointments for this day alone. You think it’s going to be a busy day. Busy as it would be, but you really don’t have to worry at all because there’s a solution to your looming headache. Firstly, you have to keep your cool and secondly, schedule your activities and manage your time so that you can finish working on the tasks without much wrinkles on your temple. What you will do is actually called time management.

What is time management?

How does someone define what time management is? Time management is a set of ways that you can do to plan and schedule time with the primary purpose of achieving efficient and effective use of time for oneself or for other people. If you manage time so you can increase your own productivity, this kind of time management falls under the category of self-management. But if time management is executed for other people, say, for employees in a certain company, the result would be easier facilitation of work and employees and increased accountability.

Hundreds of thousands of books and articles have been written about time management and most of them offer ideas that conflict with what is written by another author. In spite of that, these books and articles offer common pieces of advice for “people who worry.” These books and articles similarly rant about techniques on to-do-list, goal and priority setting.

These strategies in time management that you will employ are usually anchored on setting of goals. These goals in question are actually big and somewhat complex commodities; hence, these goals need to be put down into writing and need to be simplified into a project, action plan or a to-do-list.

From goals to projects, action plans and to-do-lists

Projects are ways of employing discipline to organize and manage your resources so that you can accomplish a work that complies with the set requirements. Action plans encompass goal or objective setting, which allow people to state objectives and work to attain those objectives and project setting. Project setting affirms that goals or objectives that you set can be better achieved if they are S.M.A.R.T; that is, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. On the other hand, to-do-list is simply a list of steps that you schedule to be done on a specific working time and deadline. The completion of which would mean that the project is already or about to be achieved. The proven and tested way of writing to-do-lists is by pen and paper, in which the completed task is marked out.

Now, these are the basic ideas in time management that you need to know in order to improve your work efficiency and effectiveness (self-management), on a personal level. However, time management on a corporate level would increase the sense of work responsibility and sense of duty of each employee (accountability). Furthermore, time management cannot be separated from goal setting which could be narrowed down into three important strategies; namely, goals, projects and to-do-lists. So the next time that your boss piles up sheaves of documents on your table or the next time that research papers come up, you don’t have to think too hard on how you can finish them all in one blow. Knowing what time management is would give you the much needed clue.

About the Author: Jesslyn Reinecke is an avid fan of Time Management Techniques, and runs a resource center on Time Mastery. To learn more about managing your time, visit

TimeMasteryNow.com

Source:

isnare.com

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