Self and Organizational Time Management

Time management includes tools or techniques for planning and scheduling time, usually with the aim to increase the effectiveness or efficiency, or both, of personal and corporate time use.

Time management for personal use is a type of self-management. It refers to methods, skills, and strategies by which individuals can effectively direct their own activities toward the achievement of objectives, and includes goal setting, planning, scheduling, task tracking, self-evaluation, self-intervention, and self-development. In a corporate setting, it can satisfy the need to control employees, make it easier to coordinate work and increase accountability of individual employees.

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. This process results in a daily/weekly plan with a to-do-list

In managing time, psychology should be based on making it easy and enjoyable to stack, track and retrieve all the information related to the things you need to get done. Its core principles are: (1) to collect—capture everything that you need to track or remember or act on; (2) to process—deal with an item a time, delegate it or defer it; (3) to organize—set a list which can be used to keep track of items awaiting attention; (4) to review—considering the time, resources and energy decide which activity is most vital; and (5) to do--put it to immediate action.

An important factor comprising management of time is setting priorities. It can be done through the ABC technique that has been used in business management for a long time by categorization of large data into groups. 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.

Another technique is the Pareto analysis. It is a statistical technique in decision making that is used for selection of a limited number of tasks that produce significant overall effect. It is a formal technique useful where many possible courses of action are competing for your attention. Basically, it consists of estimating the benefit delivered by each action with subsequent selection of a number of the most effective actions that deliver the total benefit reasonably close to the maximal possible one.

Most of the time, to achieve better results, ABC analysis is frequently combined with Pareto analysis.

In a company’s existence, time is one very vital element. It should be used wisely and functionally. Identical lengths of time may be judged by people 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. So time, when managed brilliantly, induces a better labor force, resulting to a business’s longevity and healthier profit.

Copyright 2007 Ismael D. Tabije