You have read 2 parts of time management. The following is the third part of the 10 point series in time management. Before you read the following points just keep in mind to practice what has been learnt.

5. Do not procrastinate

What you can do today, you should do today itself. In fact, if possible right now. Each one of us goes through a series of tasks and responsibilities that we have to perform every day, every week and sometimes every month. If only we did things on time we would not have to face embarrassment, lose time and energy at reinventing the wheel

Remember the old saying - A stitch in time, saves nine.

Image Credit : JR 1959

Look at the other side of the story now – Again, lets take the example of a credit card. Assuming that you have to pay a credit card bill and you very well know that the credit card payment is due on a certain date of the month, every month. You get the statement a couple of weeks in advance.

The banks give you enough time to make arrangements for money. Sometimes you make it up from your monthly salary. Other times you ask your friends or relatives  to pay it for you. Whatever you have to do, you do and at the very fag end of the due date you somehow manage to scrape through.

More often than not, you end up paying a late fee for being just a couple of days late because the check that you submitted got realized only after a few days of you actually putting it through.

Now, think about this incident again – If you knew that there is a credit payment and that it is due every month on a certain date, why wouldn’t you make the arrangement before hand itself ? If you are in the habit of asking your friends and relatives, why do it at the last minute ? Couldn’t you just start working on it when the statement arrived ? Or better still, why wait for the month to be over for the payment to be made ? Can’t you drop in the check when you make the purchase itself ? These days your life is even more flexible with online banking, mobile banking etc.  Why don’t you make use of the available resources and do things on or before time before it is too late ?

C’mon ! There are so many things that you can do to avoid procrastination. Yet you don’t realize how much of a time wastage it is to not do things on time. May be you will, one day.

My suggestion is at least don’t procrastinate the realization part, for heaven’s sake. If you don’t realise it now, it might be too late before the obvious becomes no more obvious.

You might end up craving for time….your entire life.

6. Always MAKE Decisions

My dad always says “Wrong decisions are better than indecisions”. Indecisiveness is the biggest enemy in your path to success. If you are not capable of making decisions and that too on time, you will regret for your life.

Because time will not wait for you. Remember the old saying “Time and tide waits for none”

If you have a dream and you constantly wish how you achieved those unachievables and suddenly an opportunity comes along your way, you keep staring at the opportunity analyzing what will be your benefit ? how much you will get ? is it worth the effort ? what will my papa, my mama, my pals etc think ? how do I devote time ? where can I get the investment ? etc etc, you will realize that before you realized that you have made a decision the opportunity has gone to someone else.

If you don’t make decisions quickly and effectively, chances are that you will take an eternity to make one. And if you are dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur, forget about dilly dallying. Just forget it. There is no time for decision making and most definitely, absolutely no scope for errors too.

While it is important to make decision, it is also important to make the right decisions. Decisions need to be made quick, but they need to be calculative as well. You can not sit an issue for long waiting for things to happen. It doesn’t work that way.

Successful are those who know how to make right decisions in no time.

Popularity: 10%

In continuation of the article that I have written yesterday, here is the second part. If you want to see the first part, click here

3. Objectivise your goals

Goals and objectives are different words but they mean almost the same thing.  Without getting too much into details, I’d like to tell you how important this is in creating time for yourself. Goal setting is so damn important not just from a career perspective but from your day to day living as well.

Think about this – You start your day without setting goals what you want to achieve at the end of the day, your performance will never be measured on a day to day basis. If you don’t measure your performance on an ongoing basis, you will waste time at the end of the month trying to correlate each other and at the end you will only ask yourself why you did not do what you were supposed to. Net result – time wasted.

Each goal needs to be objective. Yearly goals need to be broken to monthly and monthly ones to weekly and then daily. If you don’t, then you are no better than a truck driver in a desert, not knowing where to go.

4. Work to prioritize

Knowing what you have to deliver and sticking to the plan is as much important as drinking water to survive or attending to your nature’s calls. It is a matter of survival habits and in these days of competition, if you don’t know what you ought to deliver and when, it will leave you half baked.

Prioritization takes top most priority after setting up expectations, planning and setting goals. I don’t need to tell you how to priorities, you know what suits you better and when. However, if you still want a simple solution here are a couple of suggestions

Image credit: Ink River

Classify your priorities in the following order

• Things which are very important and very urgent
• Things which are very important and not urgent
• Things which are very urgent but not important
• Things which are not urgent and not important

Put them in four quadrants

The first 2 categories are value added and the next 2 are cost added

Example

It escaped your attention for a credit card bill to be paid tomorrow which will otherwise attract penalty and credit rating. Here you don’t have a choice. If you don’t act now, you will not only lose time and money but also reputation. You should put that in the first category. 

You get a credit card bill to be paid after 15 days. Important but not urgent. This falls into the second category.

You are about to leave your house for office and an uninvited guest pops in. It is urgent to attend to him but it may not be important for you. This falls into the 3rd category

You watch TV 5 hours a day, sleep 9 hours a day besides your 8 hrs of work. Watching TV is not urgent, not important. Sleeping 6-7 hours a day is OK, 9 hours is overkill. This kind of activity falls into the fourth category.

It is a universal fact that generally people spend 

• 60% of their time in the 4th category,
• 20% in the 3rd category,
• 5% in the second category and
• 15% in the first category.

Wouldn’t it be ideal if people allocated

• 60% of their time in the second category and thus not allowing it not to go the first category
• 20% of their time in first category
• 15% of their time in the third category, just to maintain the relationship like friends, neighbors, politicians etc and
• 5% of the time for not so urgent and not so important activities.

You may or may not do this exercise but definitely is a way to understand and rank your priorities. You don’t necessarily have to do it with a pen and paper. Even if you are able to do it in mind, that will give you enough reasons to work with one and reprioritize the other. 

Once you get into the habit of prioritization, you will soon realize how much time you have saved by not giving importance to the less priority ones and vice-versa.

Part – 3 to follow soon..Watch out !!!

Popularity: 11%