Time Management must for Career Success and Family Happiness.

-“Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, Lost knowledge by a study.

Lost health by temperance or medicine, But lost time is gone forever”. --Samuel Smiles

Time is a prestigious, priceless and free gift of God for the whole humanity. It is not limitless and does not wait. You must use it efficiently and effectively for self-growth and growth of your organization. We are living in a highly competitive world, full of uncertainty where many events are happening around us, which are not in our control. Stop worrying about those and keep the focus on what is available to you now or in the near future. You should consider the past as elapsed time and only recall lessons learnt from the past. Time clock does not wait or slow down for anyone. It is continually moving as the earth is revolving 24x7 around itself. Likewise, seasons do not wait as those relate to earth steadily orbiting around the Sun. Therefore make the best of your present and make a better plan for your future. Out of all resources available to you, time is the most important resource for accomplishing your mission/task. If you manage your time well, you can always excel and be recognized as a very important team member.

You must have a realistic goal and plan as to when and how you would reach there.  Out of all resources available to you, time is the most critical resource. It needs to be well planned and utilized efficiently to achieve your goal.  For this, you need to know your job requirement, your own capabilities, and those of your team. To take control of your time, you should remain focused on your job and minimize interruptions. Some tips for time management are given in succeeding paragraphs.

·          Define your realistic goal clearly. You must have a dream or vision; say what you can achieve in say 30 years of active life, break that down into smaller time blocks with smaller goals, which are realizable say in one year, three years and five years. It may require acquiring additional qualifications, skills or arranging funds to undertake your mission. Your goal should be specific and not vague or general.  

·         Maintain personal Diary. It is not possible for anyone to remember all tasks and ideas say for a month, with relative priority. It is, therefore, best to record your thoughts in your diary. Similarly, one may not remember dates and timings of various meetings, discussions, conferences and appointments. All these should be written down and periodically updated.

·         Best Time to work. Identify your best time when your efficiency is at its peak and mind is calm. Do not use this time for doing routine tasks, which could be easily done later or by others. This is the time for undertaking the most challenging or hard task. Keep all interruptions away and may put a sticker on the door.    DON’T DISTURB

·         Don’t procrastinate. Get set and take off. If you are to cross a river get set and jump to swim across, instead of your hesitating and keeping looking at the flow of water. Be quick in decision making and be a go-getter.

·          Daily activities needing your time.  It is rightly said “Time is Money”, and we must manage it well. In a day, you have 24 hours and taking out 6-8 hours of sleep, you have to say 16 hours to plan what to do at home while commuting to the workplace and for the job at the workplace. List of common   activities to be carried out daily are given below:

·         Getting up in the morning and get ready for morning prayer/meditation.

·         Taking breakfast and listening to the news or spiritual melodies.

·         Reading newspaper/magazine (if not self-driving) or listening to the recorded program while commuting to the workplace.

·         Planning, monitoring and controlling your team at your workplace.  

·         Directing teamwork, interacting with seniors and stakeholders.

·         Prioritize “To-Do List” and pick up a difficult task first when you are at the peak level of your energies.

·         Earmark some time for self-audit, Must earmark some time for self-reflection and free-wheeling of thoughts to innovate.

·         Time for tea breaks. This should short say 20-30 minutes, During tea -break, you may attend to communications like Emails, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn.

·         Attending meetings, presentations and conferences.

·         Business travelling and dealing with customers/clients and vendors.

·         Attending or conducting seminar/presentation.

·         Afternoon lunch break and a short stroll.

·         Yoga / Gym activities as scheduled for the week.

·         Spending some time with family.

·         Holidaying and recreation for the family.

·         Analyze how you spend daily time. The first step is to find out how you spend time at present. You may be surprised that you undertake many non-productive activities and do not work as per priority. To discover this, you may use a simple Excel sheet as shown in Table 1.

Activity /task	Start time	Finish time	Time taken in minutes	Priority  1-5 allotted as per plan

               

      Table1   Daily Activity Sheet

From the above table, you may observe that you are not spending your valuable time as per allotted priority to various activities. You are unknowingly creating a lot of backlogs.  Take this analysis as a wakeup call and discipline yourself to plan well, delegate judiciously, periodically review “To-Do List” and stick to schedule and priority.

·         Time Savers.  Time lost on less important tasks will have accumulated impact on the project timeline. Time does not wait and gets consumed continuously. It is the most important resource and needs to be saved, wherever and whenever possible. 

“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants.

The question is what are we busy about? “-Henry David Thoreau

 By time-sharing and delegating certain tasks to others, you can save valuable time for more important tasks which need your personal attention. Some common tips are:

·          Break down a big job into smaller tasks and keep their design simple to ensure faster and quality implementation.

·           Focus on the job on hand and do it efficiently and effectively.

·          Use templates to speed up work and do not “reinvent the wheel” by starting from scratch just because of your personal ego.

·           Insist your team follows checklists and Standing Operating Procedures ( SOPs) for various tasks.

·           Delegation of the job to team members as per their capacity and have trust in them. Don’t be know-all and hold on tasks which  could be done by others in your team,

·          Cut out unwanted activities like telephone  /video calling of peoples, personal emails, and social media interaction like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

·         Stay in your workplace and don’t get up to loiter around, which will be very distracting for others and waste of your time.

·         Maintain priorities following a simple principle of MSC (Must do, Should do and Could do). While you do “first thing first”, you should regularly review exception, if any and you should attend to that as an emergency.

·          By multitasking and time-sharing, you can gain 1-2 hours a day.

·         Learn to say no, for less important events. Treat those as the interruption to your scheduled activities.

·         Be precise in conversation on phone call or during scheduled meetings.

·         How to control unproductive activities? Time is moving forward and will not wait.  It is your time and you must not waste in the hesitating and lose the opportunity. You must use your time wisely.  If you are having full faith in your capability, have required knowledge and skillset and you manage your time well, you can be a great achiever and inspiration for your team. Good time management will show how much time is a spent producing the result and how much time is wasted on unproductive conversations and actions. Some tips are:

·         Timesheet. It could be a hard copy or digital diary on which you should record all your thoughts, conversations and activities for a week. You'll see how much time is actually spent producing results and how much time is wasted on unproductive thoughts, conversations and actions Any activity or conversation that's important for the organization should be in your “ To-do list” and have an adequate time assigned to it.

·   Appointment registers.  All appointments related to you meeting others and others meeting you must be scheduled and recorded in your appointment register /diary. The schedule must have a time block start and finish time. Be disciplined to keep these appointments.

·         Unscheduled visitors. Do not entertain such a visitor and let them meet someone else. They will upset your well thought out schedule and some important task may be put off.

·         Time for interruptions.  Despite your best efforts to stick to scheduled activities, there will be interruptions from seniors, visitors and team members. Therefore, plan some time to cater for unscheduled activities.

·         Techniques to manage your time:

·         Plan your day and follow diligently. Take the first 30 minutes of every day to plan your day. Don't start your day until you complete your time plan (activity chart).   

·         Display "Do not disturb" Sign Board.Put up this sign when you are doing a time-bound important task. You need a concentration of thoughts and no distraction of any sort.

·         Keep the distraction away. While sticking to your schedule, make sure that your time is spent on the actual task at hand. While on duty, turn off your cell phone and resist the temptation to attend to social media and private personal emails.  Answering official emails could be part of the job but jumping to answer email, in the middle of your workload can severely limit your productivity. Setting a specified time in your schedule to answer emails or make telecalls to a client or home/friend will allow you to be more productive.

·         Do not answer every ringing phone or e-mails. When things get really pressurized and you’re tight on time, ignore the email and WhatsApp like messages Resist the temptation to pick up every ringing call or some notification may pop up on your laptop screen. Disconnect instant messaging. Don't instantly give people your attention unless it is crucial in your business to offer an immediate human response. Instead, schedule a time to answer emails, WhatsApp messages, and return phone calls.

·         Block out distractions.  You should block out Face-Book and other forms of social media unless you use these tools to generate business.

·         Do one thing at a time. Multitasking is a useful ability in almost every facet of life, but it can also affect your productivity. Everything you are doing besides the task at hand is delaying you from completing your main task. Therefore plan to do first thing first until there is some emergency to suspend present activity and respond. This may happen once a while otherwise follow your scheduled program.

·         Keep the backlogs low. If there is a task that you are very worried about, do it first. It is well recognized by physiologists that every unfinished important task, will keep on nagging you where you are carrying an invisible weight of 1-2 pounds per unfinished task. You will be stressed and have muscular pain in your back or shoulders or other main joints. You should just do that task and knock off stress hanging on you for the whole day long. Thereafter everything will be easier once that pain is over.

·         Stop procrastinating. You must start your work within five minutes of sitting down at your desk and switching on your computer.  If you value your time and other people will do the same.

                   Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating your next moment. That is what’s real. -  Sara Paddison.

·         A break to recharge your battery. Take short breaks to say after 2-3 hours of hard work to recharge and refocus. Take lengthy breaks away from work at the weekend and on holiday to help you stay productive in the long term.

·         Distraction. Identify all things which are causing a regular or repeated drag or drain on your time. Take these things one by one and, get rid of.

·         Prioritize your workload. Time is not unlimited for you to go easy in your efforts and complete various tasks/commitments. In a day of 24 hours, you get 10 to14 hours of productive work and rest is needed for 6 to 8 hours of sleep/rest, 1 to 2 hours of commuting, two hours at home attending to daily chores and at least one hour for the family /children. Therefore you must prioritize your daily work schedule and stick to it.

·         First Thing First. While multitasking is often needed, you must still fix your priority and do only a few things at a time, else your energy will be dissipated and most jobs will remain “Work in Progress (WIP)”. If you’re doing a low priority task like the handling of social media, email, or internet searching, take off your watch and put it on the desk, noting what time you started and how long you intend to spend on these. Be firm on your plan, switch off social networking as the time ends and get back to your higher priority job.

·         On-Time. It is good to be on-time and every time. But is better to be before the time for reaching the workplace, or when attending a meeting or interview or negotiating with customer/vendor or a new partner. You would be more relaxed to participate more effectively.

·         Time is the best teacher. It is true that time is a great healer and best teacher. You always learn from success and failures from the past and do things better next time. Learn lessons from past events and don’t worry about small issues but do not repeat mistakes.

·         Focus on the present. Do not keep thinking and worrying about the past failures.  Be in the present, put in your very best and your results will be well appreciated by your team, seniors and the management. If you take care of your present, it will be easier to build your future.

·         Reduce stress.  Find practical ways to reduce stress in the workplace as well as at home. Take a short break at the workplace and give adequate time to family. You should be accommodating other's views so that confrontation leading to stress is minimized. Maintain good health and do regular meditation/yoga to calm down.

·         Boost your Productivity. We often talk about not having enough time and end up with a backlog. In fact, time is always there for the planned activities. By judicious and disciplined time management you can enhance your productivity.

“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year – and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!“ Anthony Robbins

Practice. Practice and Practice. All the above techniques and concepts must be put into practice for saving time and stability of your career. Remember that time lost is time gone. The earth and the planets are all in perfect and continuous motion and so is the day/night.  Therefore daily clock of 24 hours does not stop but keep clicking forward.

 If you stand on a riverbank, you will notice that water once gone past you, will not come back to you. Indeed time is priceless, free, and your biggest asset.  They also say, “Time is Money”, utilize it most judiciously for living a happy and purposeful life.

For more information please refer to my Book – Career challenges during Global Uncertainty.  Available on www.amazon.com

Dr Sarbjit Singh, Former Executive Director, Apeejay College of Engineering, Gurgaon, Haryana, India