How to manage time effectively?

By Smita Sona

Within the first few days of starting with college curriculum, many students quickly learn that managing their time is one of the most challenging and difficult aspects of being in college. They tend to feel burned with loads of, regular assignments, presentation, activities, tests, seminars and 9-6 pm class lectures. As in the words of Peter Drucker, ‘Time is the scarcest resources and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.’

With so much to do and keep track of strong time management skills can make all the difference.

Things You'll Need

You would just need a pen and a personal diary to mange your 24 hours.Just as our favourite foods are least healthy, we will find that owe favourite activities are the biggest waste of time. Self discipline, in particular is not the strength of many of us. But careful and consistent effort can make all the difference. If time, the scarcest resource and indeed the most precious one, then how do we manage it and deploy it in a better way?

Steps

Measure it: As we measure our weight we need to measure our time because if we don’t measure it, we can’t address it. After reading this article make a note of what you did today, mentioning every hour. You can use a paper, a calendar diary, a PDA or anything you are comfortable with. Continue this for next seven days. But, make sure you are honest about your every hour mentioned. If you have spent time ‘doing nothing’ mention it in the same way. Write down everything, ‘class lecture’, ’assignment’, ‘lunch’, ‘chat on phone with friends’ or ‘browsing the internet’. This exercise will then help us with our second step

Categorize it: Once you have collected the data for 7 days, now you can categorize them and break them down. Simply put similar activities together. For instance, it could be class lecture, presentation preparation, self study, or leisure hour. Now group them again into High Value Activities, and Low Value Activities. The idea is to see where your time goes the most. This brings us to our third steps

Prioritize it: Now as you have analyzed the time spent on different activities. Just prioritize them accordingly. Activities which needs more time and effort needs to be done first, then comes those activities which may not be helping you in your business study programme, but surely boost your energy and personal life, like a small chitchat with friends, a ramble after dinner, should be added to your daily schedule cleverly. A small example here from Stephen Covey’s ‘First Thing First’, were a speaker walks in through the audience and fill a bucket first with rocks and then ask the audience if its filled. On receiving the answer as ‘yes’, the speaker starts filling sand in the bucket making the audience realize that the bucket can take more and finally pouring water into the bucket makes them realize that the bucket is finally full.

The insight of this story here is that bucket would not have taken all these rocks, sand and water in the same quantity as it has. If the order of material filled in the bucket was different. Similarly if you assume your day time as bucket- high value activities are the rocks which should go first and then low value activities should take your day. And to do this it needs a lot of self discipline, which we have mentioned earlier. Once you make it a practice to finish off with your important task you yourself will see the reward flowing in.

Tips

Appraise it: Finally we have come to the last step of TRM, and that is, to value your time, if you don’t, then we can’t expect others to do so for our time. It might be rude sometimes but then sand and water cannot come before your important rocks, correct?

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