Time management skills are our abilities to recognize and solve personal time management problems. The goal of these time management books, seminars or courses, is to show us what we can do to improve our abilities to organize and prioritize. You get my drift. 

I’m sure many of us have read numerous books and attended seminars about time management.  Immediately comes to my mind Covey’s “First Things First.”  Well, I know about it too much, even write about it, but quite honestly, I’m struggling with it at the moment because my external distraction is much more than my internal plans about it can hold.  Some things are just beyond our control, as a result of past decisions that our present situation has to suffer, and we have to face squarely consequences no matter how it hurts or affects the better part of our intended life.  We probably know a lot about time management, but sometimes the actual practice is always the most difficult to execute.  Ah, if only we can have control over unreasonable and often times inconsiderate external distractions.  It’s a pity.  Hours, especially those which could have been productive, lost!  But at least with time management exposures, we can see better which time management techniques are most relevant for our situation.  

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Sourced from Wikipedia:

Time management includes tools or techniques for planning and scheduling time, usually with the aim of increasing the effectiveness and/or efficiency of personal and corporate time use. The common denominators of these strategies are a to-do-list, setting priorities and goal management. Some of the best known examples of time management strategies are tied to specific lines of time management products.Time management for personal use is a type of self-management. In a corporate setting, time management software can satisfy the need to control employees, make it easier to coordinate work and increases accountability of individual employees.

Planning time and writing to-do-lists also consumes time and needs to be scheduled. This is one of the major criticisms of time management.

Time management strategies are usually associated with the recommendation to set goals. These goals are written down and broken down into a project, an action plan or a simple to-do-list. Deadlines are set and priorities are assigned to the individual items on the to-do-list. 

The four generations of time management

Stephen Cover, the well-known time management guru offers a categorization scheme for the hundreds of time management approaches that are on the market.

First generation: reminders

Aficionados of this approach limit their time management efforts to keeping lists and notes. They see these papers as reminders. Items that are not done by the end of the day are transferred to the next day’s list in the evening. Covey also calls this type of style the “Far Eastern, Go with the Flow”.

Second generation: planning and preparation

People in the second generation use calendars and appointment books. They will note where meetings are held and identify deadlines; this is sometimes even done on a computer. As opposed to the first generation, the second generation plans and prepares, schedules future appointments and set goals.

Third generation: planning, prioritizing, controlling

Third generation time managers prioritize their activities on a daily basis. They tend to use detailed forms of daily planning on a computer or on a paper-based organizer. This approach implies spending some time in clarifying values and priorities.

Fourth generation: being efficient and proactive

Covey in his First Things First, refers to his approach as the so-called 4th generation time management. For the fourth generation, he emphasizes the difference between urgency and importance in planning.

However some critics of time management methods consider that the whole concept of prioritizing by importance is flawed since once a project has been taken on all the work relating to it needs to be done. Questions of importance or non-importance are irrelevant. An illustrative example would be the building of an automobile, where the engine and wheels may be more important than the rear-view mirror and the carpets, but nevertheless a complete automobile would need the rear-view mirror and the carpets just as much as the engine and wheels. The critics would say that Covey correctly notes that, if you always action things on the basis of urgency, non-urgent things are never going to get done. But he fails to note that exactly the same applies to importance - if you always action things on the basis of importance then when do the non-important things get done? If trivial things are allowed to build up, they will gum up the works so effectively that the important work won’t get done either.

Once an item that is characterized as unimportant is perceived to be necessary to an important objective, however, its priority should be adjusted to a higher level. Planning cannot be static. As von Moltke is reputed to have said, “Planning is everything. Plans are nothing.”

Techniques for setting priorities

ABC analysis

A technique that has been used in business management for a long time is the categorization of large data into groups. These groups are often marked A, B, and C—hence the name. Activities that are perceived as having highest priority are assigned an A, those with lowest priority are labeled C. ABC analysis can incorporate more than three groups. ABC analysis is frequently combined with Pareto analysis.

Pareto analysis

This is the idea that 80% of tasks can be completed in 20% of the disposable time. The remaining 20% of tasks will take up 80% of the time. This principle is used to sort tasks into two parts. According to this form of Pareto analysis it is recommended that tasks that fall into the first category be assigned a higher priority.

The 80-20-rule can also be applied to increase productivity: it is assumed that 80% of the productivity can be achieved by doing 20% of the tasks. If productivity is the aim of time management, then these tasks should be prioritized higher.

Time

Different people may judge identical lengths of time quite differently. Time can “fly”; that is, a long period of time can seem to go by very quickly. Likewise, time can seem to “drag,” as in when one performs a boring task.

In explaining his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying that although sitting next to a pretty girl for an hour feels like a minute, placing one’s hand on a hot stove for a minute feels like an hour.

Management is the process of getting activities completed efficiently and effectively with and through other people.

Management is “working with and through other people to accomplish the objectives of both the organization and its members.” This definition places a greater emphasis on human beings in the organization; focus is on results to be accomplished (objectives), rather than just activities and adds the concept that personal objectives should be integrated with organizational objectives.

Thanks to Wikipedia/Time Management