9

The Art of Time Management

“You will never find time for anything. You must make it.”

 

–Charles Buxton

9.1 Time Management—What Is It?

Haven’t we all felt Sheetal’s anguish sometime or the other? What can we do when overwhelming demands are made of our time by so many people and so many things? Why is it that some people like Sheetal are caught up in a turbulence, whereas some others, like Shilpa, can handle a similar job effectively and even thrive in the same get-it-done-yesterday atmosphere? Are Sheetal’s problems entirely her doing or can we blame it on her heavily-globalized, high-pressure corporation?

Let’s look at the last question first. The modern workplace indeed heaps an unprecedented amount of work on its workers. The ever-shrinking product life cycles, short project durations, fierce global competition, and high level of customer service all push the workers a wee bit harder and spin them a wee bit out of control. The sheer volume and complexity of today’s work assignments can rattle the faint-hearted and induce all kinds of time-related problems. We can either wilt and wither like Sheetal or figure out how we can handle it like Shilpa and reap the rewards of working for a modern corporation.

To be successful today, we should learn how to cope with the constant chase of deadlines, schedules and deliverables and how to ration our available time, prioritize our tasks and learn to be in-sync with other people (some half a world away). And on top of that, we should make time for our personal lives as well. In other words, we should have an active and disciplined time management system in place—not just when things go awry, but all the time.

Time management is not about being obsessive-compulsive about time and glancing at the clock every two minutes. Nor does it mean being a slave of the clock, going to bed precisely at 9.58 every night or eating lunch everyday exactly at 1.02 p.m. Rather, time management is about developing a nice internal rhythm within ourselves and then tuning our internal clock to that giant external clock. Time management is about planning and executing our activities as best as possible. It is about debugging our ‘time-honoured’ bad habits relating to time. Time management is really an easy soft skill to acquire. Like all other soft skills, it requires a little bit of discipline and some dedicated practice. The idea is to control time before it starts to control and pressure us. (see Box 9.1).

9.2 Time Management—Attitude Is Everything

The first thing to realize is that time management is a matter of attitude, reinforced by strict discipline. You have to realize that there is not an unlimited supply of time, even though it may seem like there is always a tomorrow. We all have to realize that we should not let time pass us by, but rather, actively partition our workdays into time slots and allocate them appropriately to different tasks and carry out this plan perfectly.

This attitude can be further characterized along the following angles:

Time is Money: Time is precious and you should treat it exactly like you would treat money or anything that you only have a limited supply of. Do not treat it unwisely and squander it away. You can figure out approximately how much one hour of your time is worth and perhaps this conversion can help sensitize you to the value of time—then you won’t waste thousands of rupees worth of time on silly activities like idle net-browsing or parking yourself in front of the TV. Looking at time as money gives a certain involvement and urgency to what we do. Besides, it also makes us appreciate other people’s efforts and the time they put in to do things. No wonder modern corporations put a tremendous premium on time and constantly try to streamline their own dynamics.

Time is opportunity: Time also brings us unique opportunities. Today’s moments are today’s only and cannot be got tomorrow. So, we might as well savour the present and make best use of it. The special circumstances of today, spent on today’s projects, today’s activities, today’s challenges, will present us with all kinds of possibilities and may not come again at any other time in the future. Likewise, the quality time we spend with our parents, children, friends today is something to be cherished—for tomorrow will be a different day.

Timeliness and punctuality mean trust: Timeliness means trust. Often we will have to synchronize our schedules with others’ and do things cooperatively with them. We should honour this unwritten code of trust and come together in harmony and keep our part of the commitments. Modern businesses—and in fact, the modern world— runs on specific things happening at specific times, in consonance. If you are a ‘no show’ or if you default on doing your share of things, you are going to be viewed as unreliable. And if you have chronic punctuality problems, it is only a matter of time (pardon the pun) before a time-conscious person comes in, steps into your shoes and edges you out.

We would like to point out that some people can have a contrary view of time and its role in one’s life. There are rebels among us who disdain the modern busy lifestyle and who prefer to do things leisurely and spontaneously. They would rather live for the moment than crowd up their day with busy activities. Some others would wait for the right moods and inspiration or auspicious times. Casual and passive activities are condoned by several others. We have no disputes with them and wish them a lot of luck in their non-professional careers outside the modern corporations.

Taking these three dimensions of attitude of time management—money, opportunity and trust—would cause a fundamental paradigm shift in your ability to manage time. This sets the scene for a systematic approach to managing time that we will discuss in the next section.

9.3 Steps in Time Management

The essential steps in effective time management are outlined below:

1. Look ahead and make a map of what needs to be done and when.
2. Prioritize the tasks under various dimensions.
3. Estimate the time needed for each task and fit it in the calendar.
4. Document the schedule.
5. Refer, track and revise the schedule as necessary, as changes unfold.

Let us now look at each of these aspects in more detail.

9.3.1 Planning Your Time

Planning is everything! For any activity, ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’, an old saying goes. This is especially true of a resource like time, which cannot be gotten back once lost. It is absolutely essential that we start off our time management by asking ourselves the following questions:

• What are my long-term priorities?
• What is the big picture that I need to see of myself and my organization?
• What are the intermediate milestones that I need to achieve in my journey?
• What are the burning issues that I need to address?
• What are the things I need to do in my other roles—personal, social, spiritual and so on?
• What skills do I need to acquire or hone to achieve all the objectives? Have I allotted time for acquiring these skills?

The questions given above are indicative but not exhaustive. Having answers to at least some of the questions above, constitutes the first step in planning. Planning is half the battle won. In Snapshot 9.1, the single biggest cause for Sheetal’s chaotic workdays is the lack of planning. Sheetal may have some intuitive mental picture of how to slice and dice her workday into time slots and allocate them to different activities. But she would do well to put it on paper (or in her electronic scheduler) so that things get done and any potential confusion and conflicts can be avoided. At a minimum, high priority items and important appointments should be clearly scheduled and these should set the pace for one’s workdays. Planning and scheduling and making appointments are not just for the big bosses. Everyone needs them—and you are no exception.

There is a mistaken notion that planning means planning only work-related activities. Far from it, an important aspect of planning is factoring in breaks and personal time. A big problem with Sheetal was that she got extended in every single activity and this left her with no time for breaks. To prevent this from happening, you must schedule adequate breaks. It may be tempting to keep going forever while doing some activities, but we must remember the law of diminishing marginal returns and the fatigue factor and force ourselves to take a break. It is a good idea to block a small slab of time as free time each day and not book it for anything.

Another sin that Sheetal committed was that she let her personal time coalesce into her work-time. Some of this overlap is inevitable in today’s business world, but we strongly suggest that you make a clean exit out of the office every day and get to your personal chores or recreational activities in your personal time. Don’t linger on in the office many hours after everyone has gone and alternate between office work and personal chores. Likewise, don’t look at your home as a home-office and your nights as a second shift and schedule office work at home on a regular basis.

The underlying principle is that you should finish a required amount of work each day—even if it takes some extra time. But try to do it in the office as much as possible, and make sure that this ‘extra time’ does not become a regular feature and is not so huge that it severely eats into your personal time. If in spite of your best efforts in time management, you see yourself being overworked (and under-rewarded) it is time to have a long chat with your manager.

By taking the step of planning, you arrive at a list of what you have to do. This list will obviously be like a laundry list and will definitely contain more things than you can accomplish. Hence you need to prioritize the tasks.

9.3.2 Prioritizing the Tasks

Since we all have so little time and so many things that clamour for our attention, we prioritize our activities and then schedule them, based on their relative importance. High priority items have precedence over everything else and we must make sure we allot enough time and resources to getting them done in the required time. The core or routine activities—like Sheetal’s interviews—must be done, no matter what. And then, there are some other things in life that are worth just five minutes of our time. We should learn not to waste too much time on them.

Prioritizing tasks involves ranking and ordering of those activities that you would do in a week or a month or any given period. While most of us may know what needs to be done, it is determining the priority amongst the tasks that distinguishes effective and ineffective management of time.

Some of the thumb rules you can follow in prioritizing are:

Identify those activities that you absolutely have to get done in the given time period: These include the deliveries expected of you—the programs, putting in place the quality-improvement steps, the interviews you have to conduct and so on. These also include the supporting activities you need to perform, like attending meetings, sending in status reports and so on. These are driven by deadlines that are usually tough to avoid. These are what Stephen Covey¹ calls ‘urgent’ activities.

Make sure your manager agrees with your order of priority and, if required, approves the amount of time you plan to spend on high, medium and low priority activities. Just because an activity is deemed ‘low priority’ you cannot forget about it and wish it away. You will have to make time even for such back-burner activities.

Squeeze in time for those things that you don’t have to get done immediately, but need to get done anyway: There are always activities that you need to do but never get around to doing because there is no one breathing down your neck to get them done. These are what Stephen Covey calls ‘important but not urgent’ activities. These include the skill upgradations you always planned to do, the book on soft skills that you planned to read, the thirty minutes of exercise that you promised yourself you would do every day and things like that. You will generally do all these activities only when there is a crisis. You will try to learn that new tool when pushed into a corner with a project deadline looming large—and then you will do a shoddy job. What about your exercise? Welcome blood pressure pills to swallow every day! and what of that soft skills book? Oh, that can wait till next year! The challenge is that we will all have a temptation to put off these important but not urgent activities till they become important and urgent; by that time we are in fire-fighting mode and it becomes too late or too ineffective. Figure 9.1 depicts an adaptation of Stephen Covey’s urgency-importance dimensions to time management.

 

 

Once you consider the time needed for all the activities in the ‘important’ category and add it to the time needed to finish the ‘urgent’ activities, you may find that you need to work fourteen hours per day! A person with habitually poor time management skills will be stretched for time even more and may have to toil for long hours just on these categories. So, what does one do?

One way to break from this shackle is to consciously allocate some time for the ‘important but not urgent’ activities. Initially this may entail that you work extra hours to make time for the ‘important but not urgent’ activities. But if you consciously set aside a certain time every week for such activities, you will be surprised at how much you can accomplish.

Identify tasks that you need not do during the time period: We can hear you asking ‘How can I ever set time aside for anything except fire fighting, as after all, we live by deadlines and pressure all the time?’ to answer this, ask yourself, ‘Am I always doing only things that are important and urgent?’ Alternatively ask yourself the question, ‘Don’t I sometimes do things that I need not do or should not do and thereby waste precious time?’ You will find that most likely your answer to the first question is a ‘no’ and the second question is ‘yes’. Let us be more specific. Reflect on these questions:

• When a phone rings, don’t you feel tempted to take the call immediately, unless it is a call from some irate customer you want to avoid? (Thank God for caller IDs)
• Don’t you have the urge to check your e-mail every few minutes?
• Don’t you spend time on something that is low priority in your work, but that gives you the kicks to do it and thus you push it up the priority list?
• Don’t you, every now and then, go Googling on a random walk to the no-man’s-land of cyberspace?
• Don’t you tweet to your friends about the delicious pasta in the new Italian joint down the road?

Most of You would answer ‘yes’ to the at least some of above questions. These activities can be viewed through a different set of classifications as given in Figure 9.2. A good lot of time management problems arise when one spends too much time on ‘interesting’ but low-priority activities, at the expense of important, pending matters. Very few of us are lucky enough to find a perfect fit between what we would like to do and what we need to do. Given a choice, we choose those activities that we like to do. There is an inertia that forces us not to choose the activities that we don’t like to do, even if they need to be done. This drains the time we have and leaves less time available for those activities that we actually need to do, thereby making our time management less effective. The approach then should obviously be to move from the quadrant of ‘like to do and don’t have to do’ to ‘don’t like to do but need to do’. This obviously needs an understanding that life always comes as a package, you cannot simply choose and do only those ‘cool’ activities (see Box 9.2).

 

Within each category (top half of each of the two graphs in Figures 9.1 and 9.2), list out relative priorities of each of the activities: Even after all these classifications, there are likely to be many activities than you can handle. Hence, go to the next level and rank the activities in the upper half of the graphs by priority. Is the training more important or is rewriting the code more important? Is the new technology feature more important or is certifying against a new operating system more important? Obviously these are not easy questions to answer and you may have to seek advice from others as well as use your discretion in prioritizing the activities. Spending some upfront time doing this prioritization will definitely help you get the maximum bang for the buck for every minute you spend.

9.3.3 Estimating the Time for Each Task

Having classified and prioritized the activities, the next step is to estimate the time required for each task. You will have to rely on your past personal experience as well as on those of other relevant people in your environment. This step enables you to effectively slot these activities in your calendar.

You should have an idea of your productivity rate. How many HR interviews can you handle in four hours? How many slides can you show in ten minutes? What do you expect to accomplish—both qualitatively and quantitatively—in the schedule you have made for yourself? Big corporations, mainly manufacturing houses, do what is called ‘time study’ to come up with productivity numbers for individual employees and expect them to work at that rate.

If you are asked to work more aggressively and you don’t think it is possible, talk to your manager and ask for extra resources to help you do your job.

Sometimes the time taken for an activity is also used as a parameter to prioritize the activities. When we have a list of twenty things to do in a day, sometimes we take pride in completing as many activities as possible. In this case, picking on the shortest activities and completing them can give us a sense of satisfaction. But, it is important to ensure that we don’t just pluck these apparently low hanging fruits. Picking the shortest activities to do first may eventually lead to a backlog of the longer—and perhaps the more important—activities.

Picking shorter activities for execution can also be useful in another context. Suppose you have a half-hour break in-between meetings. You cannot possibly do half of something that will take an hour during this time. Instead, you can pick an activity that perhaps takes twenty minutes to complete. In this way, you earn a ten minute break as well.

You should also remember to use the time you have estimated for an activity only as a guideline. Expect that the task may take plus or minus a few minutes off your estimate and budget it. Don’t stop the activity midway because the time you allocated for it was up; you may spend more time picking up the threads and doing context-switching when you restart the activity later. If you are close enough to completing the activity, by all means try your best to complete it, keeping the impact on the other activities to a minimum. But don’t go beyond a certain threshold as that will have a domino effect on the time allotted for your other activities. Beyond a certain limit, put the activity on hold and go onto the next.

Don’t forget to make allowance for transition time between appointments. If one meeting ends at 10.30 a.m. And another meeting starts at 10.30 a.m., then surely you are going to be late for the second meeting even if the meeting is in the same venue. You should allow a few extra minutes in your schedule to migrate from the first meeting to the second. If you have a say in the matter, do not schedule back to back meetings. If you are going out of town to attend a meeting, plan the travel time carefully by factoring in the potential airport delays, traffic jams and so on and allow extra time as a buffer. Good planners know that there are always lag times and lead times (the time between your ordering something and actually getting it) and are very good at figuring them out and incorporating them in their schedules. Be cognizant of holidays, factory shutdowns, general strikes and so forth before happily making aggressive schedules.

Often, the dates and times of activities will be imposed on you by external sources and you will have to build the rest of your schedule around it. If you have a prior commitment and a new meeting time clashes with it, sort it out right in the beginning and ask to re-schedule one of them, so that both your commitments are taken care of. (In case of a tie, the prior commitment should have greater priority.) As a rule, do not overbook or crowd up your days, if you can help it.

9.3.4 Documenting the Schedule

Having prioritized, estimated and allotted activities into time slots, it is important that you document this. You can use any of the following for documenting (and monitoring) your schedule:

• The old fashioned ‘to-do list’ on a piece of paper
• One of the ‘organizers’ with flashy leather covers and a tabbed section on ‘to-do lists’
• Any cell phone of today that usually has a to-do list in its organizer (provided you are able to use the cell phone’s small keyboard)
• Laptop, where you can integrate your mail with appointments and notes.

The specific tool itself is not as important as how effectively you use it. Even a back-of-the-boarding pass planning of your time that you use effectively can be far more effective than using a high flying Blackberry-based to-do list that you don’t use at all.

Using the tool you have chosen, you can do your planning for different time horizons—years, weeks, days. Let us first look at short-term time horizons, days and weeks, and look at longer term horizons later. When you schedule activities in your planner, you need to enter when the activity starts (day/time) and when it ends (day/time) and mark the entire duration of time to be spent on it. (If your activity is a half-hour meeting beginning at 3.00 p.m., mark the entire half-hour slot between 3.00 and 3.30 p.m.) If the meeting you are interested in is long and you cannot attend the entire meeting, see if you can attend just a part of it. Find out exactly when your part occurs and negotiate on participating in that abbreviated session.

Some of the meetings we are invited to, might require that we ‘RSVP’—or tell them clearly ahead of time whether we will attend or not—in which case, make sure you inform them of your decision. Conversely, if you are the meeting organizer and request your potential participants to RSVP, keep track of the participants who have confirmed. (In a country like India, where RSVPs are not taken very seriously, we should make allowance for ‘confirmed participants’ not showing up or the unexpected presence of people who never bothered to send their RSVPs—see Chapter 24 on ‘Meeting Management’ for more points.)

Another important aspect of documenting a schedule is keeping others informed. Spend adequate time in documenting vacation/leave plans and make sure you communicate your vacation dates to the concerned people in advance, especially your immediate manager, so that they can factor that in and arrange for substitutes in your absence.

9.3.5 Referring, Tracking and Revising the Schedule

Finally, remember that your schedule is a dynamic and live document and is subject to change. Don’t forget to update it as things develop. Always keep the schedule current and make sure people who need to know your schedule are kept well aware of any changes. This is especially important in a geographically distributed team. Visits by people from a different country should generally be planned ahead and should be the last in the pecking order to get shuffled around and the people involved in it should be among the first to be informed, should there be a change.

9.4 Time Management—Best Practices

Be a role model for punctuality: Be painstakingly punctual for all appointments, especially in high-priority activities and more so in cases where a lot of other peoples’ time is involved. If you are going to be severely delayed, but can still make it to the meeting, communicate that to your meeting organizer or the other party. If you are habitually late to your appointments—like Sheetal—you have a huge time management problem on your hands. You will not be taken seriously as a contributor to the proceedings and will not be entrusted with responsibilities.

You should be equally punctual about breaking away from meetings and appointments. If the meeting or appointment seems to spill over beyond the time limit, look for a logical break to terminate the session. If this cannot be done, telling them that you need to hurry to your next activity (or letting your phone alarm ring) is a good enough way to end the face-off. You can always make another follow-up appointment if needed or contact them offline.

Follow your natural rhythm: Different people have different styles of working. If a task requires four hours to complete, some people may start quickly, ‘frontload’ their efforts and try to finish the task as soon as possible and enjoy any leftover time later. Some others though would start slowly, but backload their efforts and pick up steam as time goes on. Yet others work at a uniform rate. Some people work in spurts and streaks. They work intensely on some days and on some activities they like. But they slack off on some other activities. People also have their own ways of taking breaks. Whatever may be your style, you should work at a pace dictated by your natural rhythm. Be conscious of time, but don’t let a clock set the pace for you, i. E., don’t keep on looking at the clock and feeling tense. Work is not like running a race against time. If you run a bit over or under the scheduled time, it is okay. But if you are way off, then you will have to resolve it with the other party or your manager. The hallmark of a true professional is being consistent in delivery through all kinds of tasks, even if his pace of work varies with time.

Make efficient use of free time and break time: Some time-efficient people tend to put even break time to good use and get refreshed efficiently. They may utilize a part of their break time to do filler activities like replying to e-mails or making phone calls and so on, but would not misuse it to do heavy-duty activities. It is an art to use break time or even to factor in break time into schedules. People who just run from meeting to meeting and take pride in the fact that they don’t have even one minute of spare time because of their tightly-packed schedules can burn out easily and may not always be successful, as such schedules lead to inflexibility and that in turn leads to ineffectiveness.

Synchronize with others: Even if you work at your natural pace, your work will have to be integrated into other people’s work. This will require you to synchronize with others at periodic intervals. Sometimes you may have to slow down your pace and sometimes you may have to accelerate. So, time management is not just about how well you manage your time, but also how you have integrated your time into a common time with your team-mates.

Don’t lose sight of ‘important but not urgent’ activities or activities that you need to do even if they are not what you enjoy doing: People who manage time effectively perform Stephen Covey’s ‘Q2’ activities (i.e., important but not urgent activities) before they become ‘Q1’ activities (i.e., important and urgent activities). Similarly they do not give into the temptations of doing only things that they like. They realize that there are things that they need to do to take things to completion and to see the benefits of the ‘cool’ things that they have done and have enjoyed doing.

9.5 Time Management—The Killers

In spite of good planning and execution, we may still lose our control over time due to various reasons, some of which are discussed below. We need to have alerts in place to warn us that we are straying from our plans. We should also have appropriate mechanisms to bring us back on to the charted course.

Tasks taking longer than scheduled time: By far, this is the biggest reason why most of our time management goes for a toss—that a scheduled activity takes much longer to complete than envisioned. This could be due to any number of reasons— inherent complexity of the task, unforeseen complications along the way, lack of proper resources, poor definition of what needed to be done and so on. If you sense that a delay is a possibility in your task, warn your upper management about it well in advance so that they can step in and try to remedy the situation. Otherwise, negotiate down to a new, extended deadline, reduced deliverables or more resources. If you do need to go with a revised schedule to accommodate the task in hand, that might push out your other commitments, you may have to re-jig your entire future calendar, generating a huge chain reaction. Also, make sure that you understand the root cause behind the delay and ensure that such delays do not recur in the future because of the same reasons.

Improper closures: In a sense, this is just a variation of the previous point. Here you achieve a significant number of goals of your activity, but you still have a few more that have not yet been completed. Yet you consider the activity as done or ‘closed’ officially, with the understanding that all the loose ends will be tied in a reasonable time unofficially, offline—which also means that even though the schedule for this task is officially over, like Sheetal and her summary report in Snapshot 9.1, you will be stuck with completing the task ‘on the side’, adding to your time burden. Clean closures are absolutely important and in case you are faced with such a not-so-clean closure, try to officially extend your schedule, instead of doing it in your spare time as extra work.

Meetings and appointments running over the limit: This is yet another variant of the earlier point. If such overruns happen regularly, make sure they don’t affect your subsequent meetings or important commitments. If you are in an executive meeting or a client visit with no clear end in sight, take turns with your colleagues to attend parts of it.

Interruptions: When you are neck deep in work, it is not uncommon for someone or something to interrupt you and demand immediate attention. The phone, for all its utility, is probably the biggest interrupter of all. If you must answer it while toiling away, keep the conversation very, very brief or do not answer at all, if you think it is not a critical call. Switch it off when you want absolutely no interruptions. Set up a voice mail box and instruct your potential callers to drop messages in it or to send you SMS messages.

After the telephones, the next big interrupters are perhaps the bosses. They are not subtle about marching into our offices (just when we are in the middle of a critical activity) and asking for that Walmart report we did three months ago. Or they may ask us to come to their office for five minutes, which will drag on for half an hour. We will then have to spend an extra half-hour afterwards to get back to where we left off. Remember, it is his prerogative to approach us for all kinds of information when he needs it. So, build your schedule with enough flexibility to accommodate such managerial incursions.

Meeting/Appointment cancellations due to ‘no show’: In a one-on-one appointment, if you are the person that is being stood up, then it is appropriate to consider it cancelled after a ten-minute wait time. If you have a lot at stake, call and find out why the other party is a no-show. If there is no answer or contact from the other party, you have every reason to be upset. But you may still have to complete business transactions with that person in spite of this—so control your emotions and go through with it. Put a large tick mark against this person and be careful the next time. If you are the customer and this incident upsets you, then be sure to express your feelings.

Ineffective multi-tasking: Multi tasking is for computers, not all human beings are equally efficient at this. In general, we do not recommend multi tasking as it reduces the overall efficiency of any task you do. Certain kinds of multi-tasking like talking on the cell phone while driving is an absolute no-no for safety reasons. Certain other kinds like participating in a meeting while having lunch is okay, depending on the context. You have to be objective in ascertaining when you would multi-task and when you won’t. When in doubt, serialize the tasks.

Procrastination: This is probably the single most significant factor why our time management goes haywire. Just postponing an activity that you can do today to tomorrow for no valid reasons (except you have to watch that TV programme today) is one major reason why the important activities never get done till they become urgent. In your time manager, have a column that indicates how many times you postponed a given activity. If you find a lot of activities that are constantly getting postponed, you are a chronic procrastinator. Give yourself a good overhaul with the principles and practices we have outlined in this chapter. If only certain specific activities are getting postponed again and again, then it clearly means a lack of prioritization among the activities. Maybe, the activity can be shelved off to a later date, in which case reset the schedules appropriately. If the activity should not be shelved, it should not be procrastinated either. Make sure you up the ante on this activity.

A poor attitude of ‘they can wait’: Sometimes people get caught up in respecting their own time so much that they trample upon other people’s times. Making other people wait for scheduled appointments presumably gives them a sadistic pleasure and makes them feel that they are more important than others. Sometimes people habitually come late for meetings just to appear important and busy. This is simply not acceptable and will not endear such people to their environment.

Being ultra-perfectionists and embellishing reports and e-mails: Some people think they are perfectionists and keep on refining and making changes to their programs, documents and e-mails and thus consuming more time than what was planned. For any activity, there is a point of diminishing returns, beyond which ‘perfecting’ will not get any mileage. Effective time managers know where to draw this line.

Biting off more than what can be chewed: In an effort to ‘fill up’ their calendar, people sometimes end up committing to more things than what they can possibly deliver. Some people get sucked into doing chores, unscheduled activities and being ‘volunteered’ by others or make it appear they are considerate to others. Helping out others and being a volunteer is good, but this should be done only when the right bandwidth is available. If you hang around the office with that foolish grin and the ‘look, I am free’ kind of look, you can bet that someone will commission you to do something and drain your time.

9.6 In Summary

India is not a traditionally clock-oriented culture. Fortunately, rapid globalization is accelerating the spread of time consciousness and time management and bringing about a sea-change in the Indian way of life. Now, it is either effective time management or a perpetual ride on that dreaded treadmill.

While the Sheetals of the world are struggling to find their bearings, some others are moving into the paradigm of ‘just in time’. This concept is predicated upon very precise adherence to time and deadlines, well-coordinated responses—and above all, a total trust in each other that deliverables will be handed as promised. It makes it possible to operate ‘just in time’ and eliminates any time buffers or time uncertainties built into our plans, thus freeing up a lot of time for other activities.

And maybe in future, someone will discover a way to add a few extra hours to a day… Until that time, here is a brief summary of ways to best utilize the time we have:

• Internalize the value of time. Time management is an attitude, not a superficial skill.
• Prioritize your activities; embark on an organized and planned schedule each day.
• Use all the productivity improvement tools you can get.
• Don’t be an ultra-perfectionist and spend undue amount of time on one single activity just to be perfect in executing it.
• Track and revise your schedule often.
• Have a sense of your natural rhythm.
• Use your free time effectively.
• ‘Close’ activities completely, without things hanging loose or left in limbo.
• Learn to handle interruptions and time over-runs and how to recover from them.
• Avoid procrastination and ineffective multi-tasking, which are poor time management habits.
• Learn to appreciate others’ valuable time.