Think for a moment, what is the most common complaint of professionals at all levels? Indeed the answer is to have a feeling that the time we have is not enough to do everything we should do. Effective time management is hard work.
You have 24 hours a day, or 144 minutes, or 86,400 seconds, and you have to divide it among the three lives you live at the same time.
Time is a scarce and limited resource that is essential for any human aspiration. Having fun, sleeping, working, eating. Everything requires time. Get to save for that new car, finish the new improvement proposal for your work project, reach the sales objectives to qualify for extraordinary incentives. Everything ends up being a matter of time. Despite working at full throttle, you don’t get to finish your homework; you don’t have time to enjoy yourself with your family; you don’t play sports or see your friends as much as you would like.
These are some of the symptoms that may indicate a poor organization of work and use of time.
- You have confusing or changing personal goals
- You lack a daily work plan
- You don’t know how to say “no.”
- Leave no room for contingencies
- You misuse communications (telephone, mail, visits)
- Reasons for what needs to be done (tasks) and not for what you want to achieve (goals)
- You do not negotiate response times
- Misuse of interview time
- You have longer and longer days
- Tiredness and bad mood permanently
Surveys carried out indicate that the average professional feels dissatisfied with the use they make of 45% of their working day! Are there culprits? Yes, and it is probably ourselves and our habits, the latter also has its positive side, and that is that the solution is in our hands.
EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS are two basic concepts that will help us improve the use of time in our working day.
Efficiency = DOING THINGS WELL. Keep in mind that it does not guarantee good results; it is simply limited to doing what is done well, but what is not done due to lack of time?
Efficiency = DOING WHAT REALLY HAS TO BE DONE. An efficient person is the one who knows the result that he must achieve and what he must do to achieve it using the least possible resources.
Combining efficiency and effectiveness is essential to make good use of the time available.
When spending the time of our working day, in addition to knowing what to do and how to do it to achieve a goal, it is advisable to determine the time dedicated to each of the tasks we perform.
This determination of the time to be used by tasks is not easy at all; the reality of the professionals of the commercial and managerial departments is difficult to determine at that time. Who knows what will occupy us to make a sale? How to determine the time dedicated to the formation of a team? In these cases, good planning is even more necessary, based on detailed knowledge of the tasks to be carried out.
THE UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES
Here are two universal principles with which we will quickly identify ourselves:
The Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule
The critical elements of any set are usually only a minority.
Statistically, 20% of work time contributes to 80% of results.
Parkinson’s Law
All work expands indefinitely until it occupies all the time available for its complete completion.
We must assign enough time to the tasks but not excessive since if I assign an hour to a task, it is almost certain that it will take an hour to complete it. But, if I only assign half an hour to it, it will possibly occupy me a little more than that available half hour.
LAWS OF EFFECTIVENESS
1st The time required for a task grows in proportion to the number of times we have interrupted and resumed it.
TASKS ARE EXTENDED WHEN INTERRUPTED. Have we ever managed to complete a moderately complex task in one go? If a task requires a certain time to obtain a result, the interruptions cause we cannot resume the tasks at the same point in which it was interrupted, but “a little earlier.” To return to work, our mind needs additional time.
2nd For a short task, there is always time. For a long one, it is more difficult to find the necessary time.
SCHEDULING AND PERFORMING A LONG TASK IS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT THAN THOSE RAISED BY A SHORT TASK.
We will use a simile to illustrate the difficulty of facing a long task: “It is difficult to park trucks.”
If we look at the first Law and extrapolate it to a large task, we quickly conclude that programming and, therefore, performing a task of some importance will be difficult for us.
We will need enough time when we think we have it, we tackle the task with energy, but we begin to run into a thousand difficulties, interruptions, small tasks that are interspersed at any time, just like a motorcycle, we can park it in any gap between cars, but parking trucks is another very difficult question. Finally, we do not advance, and what happens?
We end up delaying important but not urgent tasks waiting for the “perfect hole” that, by the way, will not appear.
All this generates a serious problem because important tasks normally require significant periods of time. And what is worse, they do not usually seem urgent of the universal life insurance policy.
3rd The value of a task grows in the form of “S,” not in proportion to the time spent on it.
Therefore, THE PERFECT IS RARELY PROFITABLE; the best way to understand this third Law is with a graph:
Initially, the task consumes time that does not directly increase its value; if we conclude this task, we will have an incomplete task, what we know as a botched task. But the pressure of a deadline can lead us to this situation.
In the last part of the curve, we have the zone of perfectionism, the product is getting better and better, but the effort involved in achieving this improvement is clearly unprofitable. This situation would respond to Parkinson’s Law seen above.
Between one zone and another is what we would call the efficiency zone. That is the area we intuitively look for when we do a job with a desire for quality, but we have others waiting.
Perfectionism is as unprofitable as a fudge. Sometimes, you lack time for long and important tasks, which you solve in an unprofessional way because you started them late. But you are a perfectionist in other small and unimportant activities (an email, a phone call) that you spend too much time on.
4th Effective people spend four times more time on important matters that are not yet urgent than on secondary matters. This is the best way to avoid a crisis.
BE EFFECTIVE IN DISTINGUISHING IMPORTANT MATTERS FROM THE URGENT ONES.
Hence, it is always advisable to make a scale of tasks based on the required parameters (duration, delivery time, hours of dedication, etc.), which will be the way to help us distinguish between an important task and a secondary task.
