Date: 12^th November 2012

Week 02 : Day 01

Time Management

According to Sasson (2008), “It is a set of principles, practices, skills, tools and systems that help you use your time to accomplish what you want”. It is important to use time effectively as time is used and cannot be retrieved. 

Having a plan to achieve goals with a time constraint helps to accomplish them faster with less effort. The 4 D’s is a time management tool and it represents Delete, Delay, Delegate and Diminish. It gives a person four alternatives if a task cannot be completed on time.

Delete: If an activity is not done on time, it does not mean that it needs to be done in the future and if it is not worth it one should not delay it and waste time in completing it. Instead get rid of them.
Delay: According to Morgenstern (2012),"Consciously deferring lower-priority tasks isn't procrastination  it's triage". "Procrastination is avoiding making decisions on when or if to do something, where "later" becomes default by definition".
Delegate: Get help with work from others. This saves time rather than doing work alone. According to Hooper (2007), “you need to be clear about desired outcomes and the consequences for the individual in doing the work”.
Diminish: These are the tasks that is kept to be done at a certain time in the future.

The table is to be filled by the students to see how much time they have left to spend on studying and how much time is set aside for co curricular activities. Adding up the total number of hours spent doing activities for the week the result was 124 hours. To find the percentage of activity time the total allocated hours was divided by 168 which is 74% so the remaining time left for studies is 44 hours. 

Figure 02: Time management exercise

Source: Lecture handout (2012)

Given below is a model, time management matrix in other words known as Covey's quadrants. The next activity given was to categorize the above set of activities done by the student into four groups which are Urgent and Important, Urgent and not important, Important and not urgent, not important and not urgent.

Figure 03: Time management matrix

Source: Lecture handout (2012)

The first grid shows activities with high priority and that must be completed immediately and is called as'firefighting'. The second grid is labelled as 'Quality Time'. Activities have high priority but there is no rush in order to complete it. According to Covey (2012), "As a result, they can be scheduled when they can be given quality thought to them".

The third box are the activities with less priority but must be completed on time and it is labelled as 'distractions' ."For example, when a person answers an unwanted phone call, -he/she has had to interrupt whatever he/she is doing to answer it". The last box represents activities that have no urgency or priority at all. An example for these kind of activities are driving time and time spent on social networking sites.

Figure 04: Time management model

Source: Lecture handout (2012)

Figure 04 helps to identify ourselves to which category each of us belong to. If you are a perfectionist, time manager, slob or a doer. A perfectionist is a person who spend a lot of time prioritizing their work but has less focus on the task that needs to be done. A time managing person saves time and does tasks that need are high in priority and they know which task is more important to be done first.

Slobs are always in disarrays because they do not prioritize the work or focus on the task to be done. Lastly a doer focus on the task but do no prioritize their work properly so because of this they are unable to complete the task.

Looking at the above figure I can categorize myself as a perfectionist because I am more focused on organizing my work than focusing to complete them. So using this information I should try to become a time manager and complete work on schedule. And as a result I am using timetables that will help me to complete work by a specific deadline, using a calender to arrange tasks to be done on specific date and creating a daily plan for all activities.

Referred books/websites  

Sasoon, R. 2008. Importance of Time Management

[Online] Accessed from: http://www.successconsciousness.com/blog/time-management/importance-of-time-management/

Morgenstern, J. 2008. Six Time Management Tools

[Online] Accessed from: http://tools-for-thought.com/2009/02/15/six-time-management-tools-from-julie-morgenstern/
CGG (2012) Soft skills for public managers: Handbook on Time Management Tools 

[Online] Accessed from: http://www.cgg.gov.in/Handbook%20on%20Time%20Management%20Skills.pdf

Nwlink website(2012)

[Online] Accessed from: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/time_management.html