Friday, October 22, 2010

Effective Time Management - Categorizing Time For Better Performance

Lots of people mistake time management for tracking time. They faithfully follow and track all the things they carry out every day, in a week or even in a month. And then they immediately stop the moment they realize progress does not materialize.

But constantly checking the clock or tracking down how you spend your time in a day is properly managing time. It is really is about maximizing time, making changes, and fully using time t maximum. For effective time management, a system should be present and should be applied.

Make no mistake about it. Keeping track of your daily routine is not effective time management, and it's not going to do you any good either. To utilize your time more effectively, the following are some effective time management suggestions.

Time Management Category:
The secret to properly managing time is to put it in different categories. By categorizing your daily routines, you can easily identify and track down your negative and positive accomplishments in a day.

1. Dealing with critical situations. Critical situations can consume many hours of time. It is a negative category, and the only way to avoid it is by spending more time on it in advance. Tasks that usually fall under critical situations are very important, so investing time on these tasks would prove to be beneficial in the long run.

An example of this category is a report that's been over due, or unexpected phone calls for an important presentation.

2. Interruptions. Small office talks and unrelated phone calls will probably top the list in this category. Write down all things you consider as interruptions to clearly define your priorities.

3. Uninterrupted Work. List down all your daily uninterrupted tasks and include your uninterrupted works. You may not be working on a job you had in mind, but by doing and accomplishing something else, this becomes more productive and positive in work.

4. Assigning Tasks. Planning tasks is the most positive thing you that you can do with your time. Planning your tasks in advance gives you better control, and better grip in accomplishing goals.

Assigning tasks can include phone calls, answering mails, or conference with staff - as longs as these tasks benefit your intended goal.

On Becoming Organized:
To effectively manage time, you should learn how to be more organize.

1. Creating Daily Record

Creating daily record should be your first step in time management. List down tasks that require priority and leave unnecessary tasks behind, the theme for your daily record should be like this.

To clearly define value of a task, you can classify it as:

a. Priority

b. Priority but not that urgent

c. Not that urgent or important.

2. Use your free time or small periods of time to get the job started.

This method is also called as 'Swiss Cheese' method where you try to use small amounts of your time to drill holes in bulk tasks. It is also one of the most common time management techniques.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/

Thursday, October 21, 2010

How Effective Time Management Strategies Can Provide Stress Relief

Much of the current time management strategies combine organizing techniques and time-saving tips along with setting priorities and improving planning skills as the method of achieving success. Many of us have sat through time management seminars, read books, seen videos and visited web sites in order to learn how to do things better and faster. We have bought more efficient planning tools such as day planners, electronic organizers or web calendars, to better manage and control our time. And what happens? We still need more time. We are still in a hurry, having no time for ourselves. Friends and family still want more of our time, but there is nothing more to give. And we still feel guilty and in desperate need of stress relief! Is there a solution somewhere out there??

Good news!!

It's time to stop running on the proverbial "tread mill" on your way to nowhere. Let's regroup. The three aspects of time management that I emphasize are:

(1) set your priorities,
(2) plan accordingly, and
(3) avoid time wasters.

With good time management strategies you are in control of your use of time, your establishment of priorities and, your stress and energy levels. If women incorporate these effective time management strategies, they can maintain a balance between work, personal, and family lives. Well designed time management strategies give even busy over-committed women enough flexibility to respond to surprises and/or new opportunities.

Setting Priorities and Setting Goals are Essential Ingredients in Effective Time Management.

With so many people wanting part of us, women often have trouble determining what need to attend to first. Stop and consider what really matters. If you are not careful, everything appears to have a sense of urgency and you will spend time putting out "fires" without much to show for at the end of the day. Many people have a daily to-do list which they use to prioritize what work is most important. Know what is important and write down the key goals you are working towards. These goals can apply to all parts of your life. Setting goals gives direction to what you are striving to accomplish and allows you to delineate what is important. Goals can be long range and can be short range. A long range goal may be a 4-year plan designed to help you complete your bachelor's degree. Within that long range goal you have many short range goals such as purchasing a safer and newer car so you can drive to the college campus, or re-arranging your child care schedule so that you can take a night class. Even completing a course and each of the class assignments would be examples of short range goals. Setting goals is an essential ingredient for effective time management because it gives you a sense of direction as to where you are going, and scheduling your time based on that direction helps you prioritize the use of the time.

Solid Planning is a Great Stress Reliever.

Did you know that for every minute you spend planning, you can save 4-10 times that amount in execution. Finding an extra 30 minutes per day is equivalent to finding 22 eight-hour days per year. That is one extra work month per year!

The best focus for planning is on a weekly basis. The most important aspect is to plan every week. Once a week, write your goals for the upcoming week. Whenever the time required accomplishing goals is more than the time available then the plan can be revised. When planning, start by asking this checklist of questions:

**What has to be done?
**When should it be done?
**What priority should it have?
**How much time will it require?

Plan ahead because it often takes longer than you think to get a task completed. Think back a day or two. How long did it take you to visit the grocery store, purchase your son or daughter a new pair of soccer shoes, order an airline ticket online, or make a doctor's appointment? One way for stress relief is to be realistic about how much time things take to get done. Some times you feel as though you are in a race against the clock, but in reality, you are much better off, accomplishing things correctly so you don't have to redo or revisit tasks.

If you find that you have a lot of stressful situations piling up in a given time period, think of ways to spread out the events. It may be beneficial to you if you can postpone some stressful events to another day as long as you don't fall into the procrastination trap. Each life stressor is additive, and the more stressors in your life, the higher is the level of stress. Planning ways to spread out the stressors in given days and weeks is a good time management strategy and stress reliever. Planning allows you to schedule quality thinking-time to focus on the important but not urgent things in your life. Examples might be planning a family gathering, preparing a business presentation, helping your child with his/her college search, or spending relaxation time by yourself. Daily planning allows you to decide which portions of your weekly plan can be achieved each day, taking care to focus on the weekly objectives. Each day determine the specific activities to undertake. Group related tasks in the same portion of the day so that you can attend to them together. And,don't forget to schedule thinking time each day. Many have found that spending the last half hour of their work day reviewing the day's schedule and adjusting the next day's schedule is both efficient and effective as a time management strategy.

Time Wasters--Be Aware of Time Gobblers

Indecision
Inefficiency
Interruptions--getting side tracked
Micro-management
Procrastination

Proactive Time Management is the ability to control one's environment, rather than let it control you.

1. Plan and set goals
2. Communicate your goals and plans
3. Schedule your priorities
4. Track and measure your results.

Crisis Mode Time Management

Urgent-do it now! Immediate attention must be given to this event, person or thing.

1. Handle it first.
2. Manage your time second.
3. Communicate what you are doing third.
4. Plan and set goals as time becomes available.

Effective Time Managers Know How To:

1. Handle interruptions quickly
2. Take advantage of personal peak working times (when do you work best?)
3. Delegate effectively whenever possible
4. Make time plans based on defined objectives and goals
5. Focus on their highest priorities

Remember that well designed time management strategies are a strong aid for stress relief. Setting priorities, developing solid planning habits and eliminating time wasting activities improve your time management and lower stress levels.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Effective Time Management For Profitable Business Leadership Results in Strategic Innovative Actions

A strategic way to boost your business leadership results, along with its profits, productivity and growth is through effective time management practices. Because time, as it is in any profession, is a critical resource in making business leadership actions profitable, innovative and transformative.

Before we continue, you need to appreciate this important fact about business leadership - whether we're talking about market, innovative, strategic, situational, transformational, project or organizational leadership - leadership in any form is always a social activity.

So with that understanding, we can look at business leadership in three generic ways: as market leadership, organizational leadership and human capital leadership.

In business organizations, entrepreneurs may choose to invest their time in human capital related leadership activities, that is in leading, coaching or soliciting and recruiting the support of their associates and trading partners.

Entrepreneurial leaders also have opportunities to use their time to contribute to the quality, quantity or significance of life for their customers and clients. I call these actions a form of market leadership.

Business leadership tasks demand that leaders analyze, plan and re-order their budgets, cash flows, operational systems or their schedules, where their sole objective is to manage their time as profitably, effectively and creatively as possible. We can call these activities organizational leadership.

A fact-of-life for those professionals charged with business leadership responsibilities - which includes the executives, entrepreneurs and managers - they will usually encounter the most disruptions, interruptions or other forms of distractions to their scheduled activities. Unfortunately in the face of that reality, these business leadership personnel tend to immediately discount, ignore or underestimate the potential value in those unanticipated events.

If you ever hope to become an effective leader you should never focus your attention on the management of accomplishing tasks against a daily allotment of your time, you should however concentrate your energies on the management or maximizing the allocations of your significance.

We know that being effective means doing the right things. We also know that being efficient is doing things the right way. Are you doing the "right things" or are you doing things "the right way"?

The problem with the focus of most time management strategies is this, we are told to be efficient in our use of time, that is, we're taught that the right way of doing time management is to plot whichever tasks we feel or believe we need to accomplish in a certain amount of time segments.

And in the case of business leadership, the right things for your usage of time must be based upon your contributions of quality, quantity or the value of your significance.

In a word, your contributions have to be acts that you take for the purpose of being of benefit to all the actors, artifacts or artifices, attributes and audiences engaged in your social activity. On the other hand, your significance must add a form of excellence, emphasis, essence, elevation, eminence, effectiveness, efficacy, efficiency, execution, elucidation, explanation, exposition, expression or esteem to your actions.

"Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see." - Edward de Bono, creativity expert

I advise my business leadership clients to keep strategic questions in mind whenever they engage in any activity. I call these mini-evaluations strategic because being strategic means being decisive, deliberate and dexterous - meaning leaders who wish to be strategic thinkers or questioners have to think through, think about and think with their actions, don't they?

The purpose of those questions isn't to generate answers consisting of one-word or a single idea. And leaders shouldn't use these questions to judge a moment-in-time as being either significant or worthless. Rather than making those types of value judgments, these questions should ensure you have competent, strategic responses prepared, organized and ready to go in advance, so that you can optimize, leverage or otherwise make the best use of those planned-for or unplanned-for periods of time.

Here is one set of example questions you could ask to help you make more effective use of your time, regardless of any interruption, or unexpected or distracting event.

"Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time." - Pablo Picasso, artist

(Can I Make This) Quality Time?

* Is it pure? [resulting in no distractions, disruptions, delays from your goals or mission]
* Is it sweet? [warm, refreshing and enjoyable experience or environment or forum or venue]
* Is it absolute? [secure, or obligated to my relationship, or persuasive or memorable]

"We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent."
- USA President Barack Obama

(Can This Moment Become) Quantity Time?

1. Is it substantial? [is there substance, meaning or fulfillment in this use of my time?]
2. Is it concrete? [producing a specific, tangible, measurable, realistic, attainable result from the use of my time]
3. Is it clear? [does it help me be or become more focused, intentional, results-driven, practical]

Or you could use dimensionally-oriented questions to determine, implement and supervise your applications of business leadership significance. As we mentioned earlier, time can be measured against a location - that is, time and a location in space are always related - so we say, "you are always somewhere at some specific point of time!"

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." - Viktor E. Frankl, psychologist

In the social expanse known as "space-time", you'll discover how dimensional constructions usually hold true. Social dimensions include the scope, importance, direction, magnitude, definition, quantity, aspect, extent, element, a position, attribute, property or proportion of any social activity.

Dimensional characteristics are important because they provide insights into the breadth, depth, thickness and heights of your utilization of time - are your capital assets being transformed into something tangibly significant, are your human players moving together in harmony, are the reasons for pursuing this action realizing the desired results?

Therefore, you will need to ask the following types of questions to generate the right types of dimensionally important answers and thus understand how well or how effectively you are using your time for performing your business or organizational leadership tasks:

* Where-When: describes a physically obvious, tangible reality of an event without trying to explain any aspect of human, social or physical capital involvement or influences;
* Who-What: defines and describes the moving parts, functional attributes and players of human exchanges, transactions, interactions or reactions
* Why-How: endeavors to provide causes or reasons for human actions and seeks to identify the ways and means employed to satisfy or attain the desires for taking those actions

We can easily describe the process of how and when to take action to use the extant sources and depth of information, which are what you have, to help you become what you desire, to unleash the future envisioned by what your dreams have awakened within you, and prosecute your strategy for business leadership to the ultimate extent of your resources, expertise and abilities.

"Dream and give yourself permission to envision a You that you choose to be." - Joy Page, actress

However, in essence, we must look at each and every one of our competitive, operational and developmental efforts as activities taking place within, and, as actions existing at points along, positions within or locations of "space-time" - that is, using these reference placements to indicate, investigate or interrogate the:

1. Manifold - Which diverse, variety and many features of my actions...?
2. Affect or Add-to the Dimensionality - the ins and outs, ups and downs, across and around, over and under, back and forth, breadth and length, brokenness and wholeness, heights and depths - of our efforts...?
3. Time-frame - When will or When must the intervals, periods, moments, phases, ages, eons, ticks occur and...?
4. Relativistic - How or How much does it relate to our past, present or future perspectives...?
5. Who benefits or is impacted by the Attractions, Interactions, Transactions or Reactions of our informed actions - and Why will they be...?

Thus in the realm of social phenomena, we define "space-time" as the distinctive features and structural dimensions which identify the cognitive, cultural or emotive segments of perspectives and interactions involved when we act, acted or will take action.

"But the best teams I've encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success." - Jesse James Garrett, Infopreneur, information architect

Therefore, business leadership means incorporating the "physics" of socially-oriented space-time into the creation and application of a much more effective time management program to generate profitable results and strategic innovative opportunities while it strengthens your organizational leadership development programs and performance improvement efforts.

Copyright 2010, Mustard Seed Investments Inc., All rights reserved worldwide.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/

Saturday, October 16, 2010

impact of an effective time management in an organizational productivity

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Friday, October 15, 2010

effective time management for the new freelancer

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Thursday, October 14, 2010

examples of effective time management

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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

effective tools for time management tracking

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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

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