Ever wondered how you alone doesn’t seem to have any time to do your regular tasks let alone having time to do some extra stuff?
If Time Management is not something you have worried till now, you may leave now. You are on good track :), else continue reading. Find out how I was also in the same situation and found a solution to tackle the situation.
The Need For Time Management:
Time Management or anything related to personal development was something I have always being passionate about. We had to figure out our goods and bads since there was no proper guidance from our childhood(it was not for me alone, it was almost true for all the kids of our time)). I guess that can be one of the reasons why most of our generation was successful and hard working also.
After passing out from the college with a degree, you are out in this world to earn money without even a clue on how to manage it since it’s something which is never thought in school or discussed in the family. These were things we had to figure out ourselves. I will discuss more on that in one of my future posts.
The matter of interest in this post is time management and let me stick to that. So, when I found that time is something that I was not able to manage, I spend a large amount of time learning about it. And I believe that’s what we need to do, if we are not able to figure out something or we don’t know about a subject, we need to go on a quest to learn about that. Have long-term plans to learn about it. It’s not that you start learning about a subject for a week or a month and you become an expert on that topic. No, things don’t work like that. So I spend months learning about time management and finally figured out some tools.
I tried many tools and currently, I’m sticking with a simple tool which I thought can be useful for whoever is reading this. One thing which came as a common factor in all time management lessons was to write down the tasks.
My Inspiration:
Make a plan and write it down. As per Brian Tracy, there is only 3% of people who have a written goal and all others works for them :), its crazy, yes its really crazy if you try to comprehend the idea. Written goals are really what matters and I’m not sure why it’s not being thought in any school or colleges. Anyway, that’s something we need to think about.
Studies after studies have proved that you have to have written goals, again, I’m deviating from our subject matter :). Let me come straight to the tool which is simple but powerful. So you just have to plan your tasks for the next day. List down all the tasks you have to do for next day and sort it from A to E. Then take and review this list carefully using the ABCDE method. This is adapted from Brian Tracy from the book “Eat that Frog“.
About The Tool:
The ABCDE stands for five different ways of allocating time on this list.
- Category A: So A is the tasks which are “Must Do“, which has to be done, otherwise, the world is going to fall. It’s super critical without which your carrier or life will be at the stake. Mark all those tasks in A and then move on to the next set, which is categorized as B.
- Category B: B category tasks are something which is “Nice to do“. Those tasks can only be done after category A tasks and those are tasks if done would be good. Mail reading etc falls under that category.
- Category C: Next category is C, which are tasks that are “Fun to do“. Taking a walk, going for a movie etc will fall into that category. So the rule is that you move from one category to another one only after finishing all tasks from the previous category.
- Category D: Now category D is the tasks you can “Delegate” to someone. All tasks may not be possible for you to be done alone, so delegate them, like folding clothes, delegate to your kid :).
- Category E: Now the next category is E, those are the ones we need to “Eliminate“. Never do them, we actually do many kinds of stuff which are supposed to be eliminated but we do it and by end of the day we feel we have accomplished something, but in reality, it had not given any value to your life. So find a way to eliminate those tasks have a strong backbone to say no to tasks which you think should be eliminated and which are time wasters.
What Next?
After categorizing all tasks into A, B C D, and E, we now have to arrange them among the categories. That is, tasks in category A which you feel is most difficult and more priority has to be done first. So you have to number it as A1, then A2 etc..Do the same for all tasks in each category. Ensure that the first task you are going to do is the most difficult task. And that’s why the book is called “Eat that frog“.
If you have not read, please do read it and have a leap in your productivity.
Tool To Track:
Again, once the tasks are listed and categorized and arranged, we should have a tool to write it down and track it. I personally use one note as it is available in almost all systems using windows. One more thing I felt useful was to break down the big task into very small ones and put a checkbox so that whenever we do the tasks and check it, we feel encouraged and motivated to do more.
I’m posting below a screenshot of how it can be done. I’m blurring unwanted stuff 🙂
Once we are done with these, there should be a tool to get us focused on one task, in my next post I’ll share a tool called Pomodoro. Please google it and you may find it useful too.
Are You Using A Tool?
Please let me know if this was in any way helpful to you. If so, don’t forget to comment. Please let me know which tools do you use for time management. Waiting for your valuable comments 🙂
