Trainism

From the past one month I have been thinking, thinking real hard about how my days are planned, scheduled and spent. The kind of person I am, I always thought I was good planning and managing time. I always felt that things and time were under my control. It was only last month when I attended a seminar that changed my approach to Managing Time. I realized I was only OK at it but needed to be the BEST.

For some reasons, for the very first time in my life, I forced my self to map my schedule on the Urgent Vs. Important matrix ( tool for Time Management) only to realize how wrong I was about my self. My division of 24 hours in a day were divided very unevenly. With 11 hours of sleep, 10 hours in the office and only 3 hours of personal time that usually went into household chores. Because of such unbalanced routine my Work-Life balance was going in for a toss. I don’t claim to be an expert on Time Management and improving Work life balance, however after doing a lot of reading on the subject & learning from my own experiences today, I have a very clear understanding of the same.

Time can be managed very well by one simple rule as per Pareto’s Principle. This is called as the 80/20 principle. If we are able to manage 20% of our cluttered style of operating, we can see it affecting 80% of our hard work. To work on this, it is imperative that we first identify where are the imbalances in our life. So for broader understanding we will pick up 5 areas of our life and think deeply about every aspect of it.

Important Areas of Our Life as per their importance:

• Taking good care of yourself Self: While talking about self, we are expecting you to look at various aspects of your life. Right from pursuing hobbies, exercising, doing the SWOT( Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats analysis) for personality development and resetting goals.
• Managing & Enhancing your Work life: Trying to understand a clear distinction between being effective and efficient. Where effective means producing good effects and efficient means producing results with minimum wasted efforts. Most of the time we are only good at one. Managing both at optimum level is what we should aim for.
• Goal Setting and its Timely Review: Goal setting is all about giving your self a target date to complete tasks. This must be reviewed every 3 to 6 months of time. Give your self 4 goals to start on with one on Self, work, Finance and Family. Keep in mind realistic and measurable boundaries before you define these for yourself.
• Being with Family and Friends: This I would say must be your De stressing time. When with family you must feel relaxed, and if you don’t then you know it is the pain area for you for the time being. Eat, sleep, play, enjoy, make the smile be doing what they compliment and like you for. Be a stand-up person for your family members.
• Increasing & Maintaining Finances:Finances play a vital role in the materialistic world. So if you are the materialistic kinds, then you know how much to earn and save to keep everyone happy around you. Some golden rules that I have learnt over the years with all the people around me is to save whenever you get an opportunity, or should I say always find opportunities to save money. Do not make investments in the same type of deposit ( which means do not keep all your eggs in the same basket), payoff all your taxes and that to yearly. Try to rotate you money as soon as possible.

The second step would be to rate all these areas of life and identify which one is dipping low and which one is soaring high out of a scale of 1 to 5. While doing this keep in mind the 24 hour clock that is ticking every minute. So go ahead, log or record how much time do you give to each area out of the of the 24 hour clock. As per theories one must on a daily basis pay attention to min 3 areas and maximum 5. Out of which Self is one area that can’t be neglected.

Once we know which area to focus more on, the third step would be to Identify some of your physical, mental traits along with your personal preferences a little closely. So come to terms with your self and truly identify if you are the night owl type or the morning bird type. You could be either the controlled personality type or people’s person. By default the controlled type would always be better at time management as compared to the people oriented kinds as they might end up taking last min jobs or queries from people around them. They would also find it extremely difficult to say ‘NO’ to people and close friends. The fourth step to effective time management is to give effective and quality time to most of the areas of identified in the beginning.

• From 5:30 am - 8:30 am: Start you day by going for a long walk or by going to the Gym. The idea here would be to come closer to the nature and self. Spend at least 3 hours of morning time with self. This time can also be utilized to review & reset goals for self on both personal & professional front. If you are the night bird kinds then from 2:00 am in the night to 3:00 am will be the best for goal setting. As it would be the time when you will be the actually alert.
• From 9:00 am - 12:00 noon: Utilize this time for any new projects, decision making that would require clear thinking and fresh mind. 3:00 am to 5:00 am would be for night owls for planning and making strategies. I can say this as I have made plans for self during these hours.
• From 12:00 am – 4:00 pm: Try to do routine, mundane jobs that you know like the back of your hand. So that you don’t have to think much.
• During Evening time from 5:00 pm- 7:30 pm: Indulge into creative stuff like process Improvement and daily reviews for both work and personal life.
• From night 8:00 pm – 10:30 pm: Look into Finances. This can be done once in every 15 days and 2 -3 hours on a bright Saturday afternoon.

It is said that Early mornings and late nights must be for Self, family and Finances and day time for work and goal setting. Out of 24 hours of day, 9 hours for job, 7 hours of sleep and 8 hours for family and self. To be able to manage your time well one must maintain a daily log for To Do List and try not to deliberately postpone it to the next day. I am sure if you will give a birds eye view to what is happening in your life, all who want to make a change in their life no matter big or small will start their journey immediately after reading this. So all the Best for a great and a happy future !!!