Monday, March 2, 2020

How to Manage Your Time rather than Cribbing about how less it is!


It is a dichotomy that New Generation Technology has been developed to serve the need of humans but still most of us end our day with so many pending tasks for the next day. Ideally, New Generation Technology should help us manage our work efficiently and leave us with more free time. Yet, when I look around, I realize that everyone has less time in a day, everyone is working more but is still not able to finish the tasks at hand.

I really wonder if this technology is there to help us or is it providing nutrition to our hunger to achieve more, which is depriving us of ever deficient time? Is it possible that our desire to finish more has increased due to upgraded technology? Can’t really answer this question without enough research, however the reality remains the same that almost every person I meet is grappling with the issue of shortage of TIME, always under pressure of leaving tasks unaccomplished.
We need to find the right answers to the biggest problem homo sapiens are facing in today’s era.







Let us mull over some of the possible ways to manage time to lead a fulfilling life:

1. Do Not Miss the Big picture – You need to have non – negotiables in your life which you will not give up in spite of how long the list is of your pending tasks. For example: Find time to exercise daily, put daily effort to upgrade your skill/s that ought to help you do your thing / job/ task at hand, find time to unwind every week by doing simple things such as going for a movie or on a date or a simple meet up with an old friend or meeting your parents etc. DO NOT negotiate with your non- negotiables.

2. Get comfortable with an Uncomfortable Zone – Build a vision to sleep less. I have personally observed and experienced that 5 hours sleep gives me sufficient energy for a long day. Therefore, you need to trust me when I say that 5 to 6 hours sleep is enough for everyone until you are being instructed to sleep more due to medical reasons. You may like to sleep extra on weekends. If you can find even two extra hours in the morning, you will be able to finish lot of pending tasks.

3. Do you have Grit & Determination? - As per the 2018 study by MIT’s Department of Brain & Cognitive Science, habits may form familiar neural pathways which makes it more difficult to break the pattern of behavior. Our brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this habit can be triggered if the habit cues come back. For example, if you want to reduce weight, just the sight of a yummy chocolate can reset all good intentions.

Therefore, you need to have a very strong resolve to change past habits which stop you from achieving your full potential. So, whether you want to wake up early and squeeze in a couple of productive hours, or want to work those extra hours in the evening from 7pm to 10 pm or want to hustle more for passive  income during weekends, you need to have a very strong grit and determination to break patterns and develop new ones. Determination will help you in taking tough decisions to remove unnecessary tasks/habits from your daily routine. It will free your time from the shackles of mundane tasks.

4. To-Do List – Innocuous yet immensely POWERFUL!

a) It sounds simple but I have seen people failing to follow their To-Do list within a week

b) Most of us may not know how to make a To-Do List therefore point a) happens.

Let’s understand the right process of making a To-Do List. You need to make two excel sheets. 1stExcel Sheet would have all the pending tasks as per the priorities assigned to them.

2ndExcel Sheet would have hour-wise/ day wise weekly plan. You need to assign which tasks will go to which day of the week.

Every day, you will work on both sheets and edit the assigned tasks as per the current progress. By working with two sheets, you will be able to control your pending To-Do List. The challenge with one single sheet is that it gets too long, scary and unending and with 2 the moment you complete the tasks of a day / hour simply delete them and start afresh daily with a list which is definitely going to get shorter because you are accomplishing by the hour.

5. Identify your Time Wasters – Lot of us may not realize the reality that we don’t have sufficient time even when we are always conscious about how we spend our time daily. The fact of the matter is our inability to identify time wasters. Time wasters are those activities which do not add any value to one’s current or long-term vision yet we end up doing them anyways.

For example, when you speak to your friends/colleagues during working hours, you may feel you are taking a short break or unwinding yourself during a heavy day. How-ever it breaks your high-level concentration from an important piece of work you might be doing. Same work might take extra time due to lack of concentrated efforts. Lot of organizations collect personal mobiles during working hours from their employees. It might sound weird in Indian context but when you realize the benefit, you would be compelled to give it a serious thought. Even schools are doing it as they want undivided, undistracted attention of their pupils for better learning. Only if one could pick one’s personal calls beyond office hours, it would definitely help in saving up your time and help in finishing more tasks.

6. Power of Consultation – This is actually my all-time favorite. You might often dismiss the power of having a deep professional conversation with your mentor/ friend about the issues you are facing with respect to time. All of us experience limited time and if you don’t find time to discuss how to use it effectively then I’d be curious to know what else could be more important in your life than time itself?

At least once in two months, take out time and discuss about your time management with your Mentor/ Teacher/ Guru. Just having a discussion will help you understand the problem deeply. Obviously when you get an outside-in view of your situation from your mentor, you will be able to find solutions beyond your imagination. You will be able to plan your life better when you realize the power of utilizing effective time.

7. Live 3 Mini Days in a Day  – I recently learnt the power of having 3-mini-days in one single day. After implementing it personally, I have started seeing the benefit of these 3-mini-days concept.

 So let us see how does one divide our day into 3-mini-days:

1stDay – 6 am to 10 am.

2ndDay – 10am to 4 pm.

3rdDay – 4pm to 10 pm.

Segregate your daily tasks into these 3-mini-days and you will be surprised to experience that the number of finished tasks is much more than the tasks finished in one day. You need to try it to believe it.

In the end, my friends, I would like to close by quoting a simple yet meaningful quote by Belle De Jour about time which goes as “Your Time is Limited. Some opportunities Never Repeat Themselves.”

Love & Respect

Nikhil Singh

NDIM

India Centre for Global Excellence

International Skills Centre India

Think HR India

Source - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-manage-your-time-rather-than-cribbing-less-nikhil-singh/





No comments:

Post a Comment

Top 8 Digital Marketing Trends For 2021

Today, it is a well-acknowledged fact that digital marketing is the staple of success in the corporate world. A good marketer is a...