Scenario one: Here you are putting in 9-10 hours, 5-6 days a week at the office, you come home and your “time-away-from-work” includes concluding the feasibility study for that awesome idea you have been ruminating on for the past 6 months; then there is the development of the proposal, pitching the idea to friends and family, sourcing for funds, deciding on a colour scheme for the website, choosing a suitable co-founder, the conversion of your spare bedroom into your office or in some cases the partinioning of your single room to create a workspace and all the nitty gritty that goes into building a startup.
Scenario two: Being the social person you are, you probably have a birthday party booked for Friday, a tech meet-up booked for Saturday, a Google hangout session pencilled in for Sunday that may probably take 3 – 4 hours, let’s not forget family errands on the same day, strategy session with all your staff for Monday, a separate meeting with your CTO for the same day, read and probably respond to over a hundred emails in your inbox and so on and so forth.
From the above scenarios, it is quite clear that both categories of individuals have a lot to squeeze into their daily schedule and suddenly 24 hours is no longer enough. This brings us to the concept of Time Management. But what exactly is time management?
The business dictionary defines it as the “systematic, priority-based structuring of time allocation and distribution among competing demands.”
Why is this important? Well, Oxford Brookes University points out that it is necessary if one intends to “spend time doing the actual things that help you achieve your goals” as well the achievement of those “…things you personally prioritise and value.
So in no particular order here are a few things to get you started.
DELEGATE
Simply put, delegation drives efficiency. To fully understand the power and importance of delegation take a closer look at the Military, those guys have it down to a science. It enables them operate as effectively and efficiently as one perfectly oiled machine.
PRIORITIZE
I personally have learnt from experience that this reduces my stress level. When I make a deliberate attempt to handle the most important tasks first, the others suddenly seem like a walk over. It also helps you identify tasks that should not be on your to-do-list in the first place.
HELLO TECH TOOLS DUH!
Tools like Trello, Evernote, ManicTime, TimeCamp, Dropbox, Bitrix24, Hootsuite and home-based solutions like Task Padi, Edves and Nortify for those in the educational sector would go a long way to helping you cut down on the number of hours you have to spend on a particular task.
LEARN TO SAY NO!
Sometimes, saying no to a couple of requests and invitations could save you an extra couple of hours in the day. I am a big fan of socializing with friends and family from time to time but that doesn’t mean you have to be out every weekend from Friday to Sunday non-stop.
FOR PETE’S SAKE USE YOUR STICKY NOTES
The sticky notes app that comes with your laptop is pretty awesome at helping you get organized. That’s where my to-do-lists goes as well as information that I would need to come back to on a later date.
REWARD YOURSELF
I’m a fan of deadlines even as I love to reward myself for every deadline met. It could be something as simple as 30 minutes on Linda Ikeji’s blog for completing a task on my to-do-list or as silly as burying my nose in Wattpad all weekend or even as extreme as a series marathon all weekend but that’s just me. Bottom line, reward yourself for a few hours with something that would otherwise have distracted you.
EMPLOY SCIENTIFIC DECISION-MAKING TECHNIQUES
Decision making can be very time consuming especially if it depends on quite a number of people. As a matter of fact, the larger the group, the longer it takes to come to an agreement. Fret not because you can employ a number of scientific decision-making processes to cut out the back and forth movements typical in a decision-making process. They include – SWOT analysis, Decision-making tree, Cost-benefit Analysis, Linear Programming, North-West Corner Method for assignment problems etc. For more on these, you should probably pay a visit to this site.
FINALLY, DO NOTHING!
According to a new study led by Sophia Ellwood, author David Burkus explains that “…taking a break can be a crucial step to having more ideas”. You can read more on that here. So you see, sometimes simply taking a break can be even more productive than spending 10 hours at the office trying to figure out what went wrong with the production design, thereby allowing you spend more time on tackling other issues.
If you concur or disagree with the points listed above please let us know by leaving your thoughts in the comment section below.
