Skill Lever 1 : Time Management – The art of accomplishing your tasks

Many think that managing time is as easy as doing any another tasks. But when you actually try to do so, you get entangled in it. On most occasions difficulty in managing time rests with our ability to execute what we have planned.

Here are few tips to improve your time management:

1. Make a note of what do you want to do in a day
2. If it’s by week / month / year you have to concentrate on what you want to achieve and make your plan accordingly.
3. For now, let us restrict to a day’s plan.
4. Next step is very important. List your activities by specific points.
5. Now, prioritise your tasks. From most important to least important.
6. Executive the tasks one by one
7. Before you begin the next day, evaluate your time management of previous day.
8. If any of the tasks left unfinished add it with the new tasks.
9. If a task takes too long to accomplish you could either delegate it to some one or you could make it most urgent.
10. Try to get help from people to accomplish your tasks. This well help you develop leadership skills.

These are 10 mantras of an effective way to manage your time. Here, one needs to understand that macro-management of your plan has a correlation with micro-management of your time.

Do you know that managing your time effectively helps you to set SMART goals. The word SMART abbreviated as follows;

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Attainable

R – Relevant

T – Time Bound

While talking about time management procrastination plays as an hampering tool that makes all of your plans unfollowed and adds burden to already existing tasks or things to do. The author of the book ‘Manage your time’, James Manktelow lists some of the negative impacts that the habit of procrastination generates. They are given here,

1. Setting yourself up to tackle large tasks, all in one go
2. Worrying too much about doing tasks in the most efficient order – unless its necessary
3. Leaving unpleasant tasks until the end of the day, when you are tired and low in will power.

Parallelly, Mr. James Manktelow also suggest some of the high impact points to avoid procrastination. They are given here,

1. Breaking large, intimidating tasks down into small, achievable ones
2. Identifying and then doing one small action after another
3. Doing unpleasant tasks at your most productive time of day
4. Rewarding yourself afterwards with something you enjoy

So far we have explored on how we can better plan out time, how time management can help us to set goals and few tips to come out procrastination. Realise! Your plans and your time is your good friend. Always!

How to overcome procrastination

Absolutely, the lasting solution lies with Motivation. Let us have a brief analysis as to why willpower could not be meant equally.

Your will power is task specific. Mostly, Motivation precedes will power. Let us take the following view, you wanted to appear for an eligibility test. No doubt that you have to prepare at least if you want to be in a winning race. You draft a time table and vow to follow it thereby you don’t want to waste your precious time.

Now, every time you sit and follow the time table you need to have the willpower to finish the task taken. Definitely, if you want to stay with your will power it should be powered by motivation. Otherwise procrastination is the result.

If there is no motivation there is not sustained willpower. In simple words, your willpower is task specific and your motivation is action specific. The later is the most important one.

Credit: Manage your time by James Manktelow

The author is Kannan Periyanayagam, Founder of IASR, a specialised academy of skill development