Pls tell me something I don't know about time management!

How often have we heard about time management, avoid procastination, effective schedulling, prioritization & many more other techniques for managing time in our daily personal & work life.
Not to mention about myself who are actually involved in project management to develop specific products in various industries for market launch on time! and yes I believed you can guess it by now that time management is very important in my work for success. Also some of us or maybe the majority of us has attended some related training courses as required according to our personal self development needs or at least for workload handling improvement.

The worst is most of the time you can't even tell your Boss that "i already have a very heavy workload got no time!!!" see what response you will get in return from him. Then maybe you will have your parents telling you, "Honey you have already spend so much time on the TV/DVD or maybe even on your favourite PS2 video games, it is time to go back to your room and finished up with your schoolwork"; then just as you are about to reply "but Mom" she will shut you off right away "no but just go" you feeling so dissapointed.

I am sure you all agree that effective time management is very important but honestly it can be difficult to achieve if it involves a change in our daily lives especially reducing the amount of time spend on things we enjoy doing most. Frankly telling me to cut down on my TV or DVD hrs spend a day will be almost definitely impossible since this has been my all time favourite activity when I was a kid ; during those days my parents use to limit my access time and now that I am all grown up there are basically no one to control other than myself. There are many of those proven techniques you can refer to from training materials or bookstore references which can be useful if you are committed for a change in your time management strategies.

Anyway though I am not a professional consultant on this topic myself however I like to share some tips on how we can manage time better by having a good look on your daily activities & assess each task based on the following common questions below;

1) Reason & its benefits;
I trust all actions or things you do must have a reason and its benefits otherwise you will not be doing it at all! The benefits itself can be related to just as simple as making you happy or even because i have been doing it all my life so just make me feel good. Just insert whatever input you can think off. It doesn't matter if it is something you like or dislikes. Note acting busy in office can be one action as well to be shown in your table, be honest to yourself because there is none other than yourself who will have access to the table.

2) Mandatory
A must actions, something of course related to your daily work like checking emails, printing orders etc.or even at home like preparing for work, school, sleep etc. For every actions you will need to estimate the duration spend on each task.

3) Goals
For every task you identify, pls state the goal achievable based on the specific actions. It can include customer satisfaction, make money, make my kids happy, better health & more...If there is none just include as it is because there may be cases we just don't know why we do certain things everyday.

4) Non-value add actions
You know most of us do have complain at times when there are actions that are a waste of time or unneccesary actions! The next question will be can it be changed or removed. I remember my wife always complain to me that she has to do all the house floor cleaning twice daily. This could be common causes of arguments for some married couples too. However after answering all my questions from 1 to 10 below, she decide to reduce it to only every alternate days or less and we live happily ever after.....you will know why when you have complete the same assessment for yourself.

5) Frequency of actions
How often you need to peform the task;
- Only Once
- Seldom
- Only when neccessary
- Daily

The next few questions is more of an analysis on the reverse if I would not need to carried out the task.

6) Can i omit the task
If your answer to question 2 above is YES, you may just leave blank for this item as the correlation is the opposite. However pls proceed and answer the next few questions.

7) Impact
Ask yourself what is the impact if you would not have done the task you have listed. Leave blank if there is no impact.

8) Delegation;
The next question will be can I delegate the task to others but note this is not telling you that you can push all your task to others. Rather you should review if there is anyone else that can perform the task much better & faster than if you would to do it yourself. It can be just as ridiculous to have me cook instead of my wife doing it even if someone will tell you "it is romantic if you can cook for your partner & she or he will love you more". Anyway I am not a dating expert but I do the cleaning up of dishes etc.. after our meal just for the record.

9) How much time will I save if delegate
Just estimate a number on how much time you will saved if you would to delegate the task to others by taking the time spend by you minus the time spend by others on the same task.

10) Favourites
Last but not least identify which task you have list as favourites for things you really enjoy doing at ease and would wish more time could be spend on it.

After you have complete questions 1 to 10 above, create another list for things that you wish to have but you are occupied and complete the same process from 1 to 10 above again but this time omit those that are not relevant.

You may want to think about what you have done in the past week and create a table like something below.


The goal of the exercise is basically to identify if there is any task where you can spend more focus on and include some other potential task which could be an opportunity loss to maximize your results. According to Pareto 80-20 rule the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes and these law has been widely use in other applications. The Pareto principle was a prominent part of the 2007 bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Ferriss recommended focusing one's activities to those 20% that contribute to 80% of the income. In our case i believe 20% of our valuable time spend can fetch you 80% of the results in your life!

In my next post, i will like to share how to include the detail analysis with scoring based on importance & relevance to identify priority actions you should focus & control.

BTW there are also the habits that can have effect on time management which I am sure some of you might have already heard about the 7 habits of highy effective people by Stephen R. Covey.

Habit 1: Be Proactive: Principles of Personal Choice
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind: Principles of Personal Vision
Habit 3: Put First Things First: Principles of Integrity & Execution
Habit 4: Think Win/Win: Principles of Mutual Benefit
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood: Principles of Mutual Understanding
Habit 6: Synergize: Principles of Creative Cooperation
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw: Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

An extract from; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People
Start your time management now! & pls share if you have any other effective strategies because i know most techniques are unique to each individual. You just need to find the right one for yourself which you can adopt without much pain.