June 14, 2011 at 17:18Time management practice
I’m getting ready to organize a seminar at work, made a small presentation and decided that the information could be useful to someone. I plan to talk about practical time management in a single head.
What I want to talk about:
Eisenhower was an army general in 1944, and was also president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. He had a lot of affairs, but it was impossible to miss something important. And so the matrix was born, dividing matters by importance and urgency.
Important matters are matters whose result of fulfillment or non-fulfillment of which has a significant effect on salary / project / transaction, etc.
Urgent affairs - affairs with an “expiration date” should be performed by ASAP (as soon as possible)
The matrix itself looks something like this:
First, important and urgent matters are dealt with at the same time, urgent and, last but not least, important ones. All other matters are postponed until later, they are destined to either resolve themselves, or go into the category of important and / or urgent.
On the Internet, I found a similar matrix for printing:
After using the described matrix daily for 3-4 months, I revealed the following for myself:
I did not use any special software, I was content with a simple exel. How it looked:
Time was set in minutes, the result of the summation was displayed in hours.
Wikipedia politely shared the definition: the Pareto Principle - an empirical rule named after the economist and sociologist Wilfredo Pareto, in the most general form is formulated as "20% of the effort gives 80% of the result, and the remaining 80% of the effort is only 20% of the result." It can be used as a basic setting in the analysis of the effectiveness factors of any activity and optimization of its results: by choosing the minimum of the most important actions correctly, you can quickly get a significant part of the planned full result, while further improvements are ineffective and may not be justified.
For clarity, the following picture lives on the Internet:
At the beginning of the day I tried to do the maximum number of the most critical cases. To do this, I filtered the to-do list by priority, and then sorted by duration. The most “quick” things were the first to be carried out, as a result, 2-3 hours after the start of the working day, I could boast of 5-6 completed urgent tasks and calmly plunged into something more labor-intensive.
What it looked like:
Situation:
What principles guided me:
And in conclusion, I share my position on the lack of time:
If time is really not enough , it means you are in demand and this is good.
What I want to talk about:
- Eisenhower matrix
- Important / urgent
- Building a to-do list for the day (with time planning)
- Pareto principle
- How to apply in practice
- Conflict of interest
Eisenhower matrix
Eisenhower was an army general in 1944, and was also president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. He had a lot of affairs, but it was impossible to miss something important. And so the matrix was born, dividing matters by importance and urgency.
Important matters are matters whose result of fulfillment or non-fulfillment of which has a significant effect on salary / project / transaction, etc.
Urgent affairs - affairs with an “expiration date” should be performed by ASAP (as soon as possible)
The matrix itself looks something like this:
First, important and urgent matters are dealt with at the same time, urgent and, last but not least, important ones. All other matters are postponed until later, they are destined to either resolve themselves, or go into the category of important and / or urgent.
On the Internet, I found a similar matrix for printing:
Build a to-do list for the day
After using the described matrix daily for 3-4 months, I revealed the following for myself:
- You can plan about 6 hours with an 8-hour working day
- Initially, planned and actual times will vary
- Keep a story everyday
- Planning automation is possible if there is something to automate and a number of rules for processing actions
I did not use any special software, I was content with a simple exel. How it looked:
Time was set in minutes, the result of the summation was displayed in hours.
Pareto principle
Wikipedia politely shared the definition: the Pareto Principle - an empirical rule named after the economist and sociologist Wilfredo Pareto, in the most general form is formulated as "20% of the effort gives 80% of the result, and the remaining 80% of the effort is only 20% of the result." It can be used as a basic setting in the analysis of the effectiveness factors of any activity and optimization of its results: by choosing the minimum of the most important actions correctly, you can quickly get a significant part of the planned full result, while further improvements are ineffective and may not be justified.
For clarity, the following picture lives on the Internet:
How to apply in practice
At the beginning of the day I tried to do the maximum number of the most critical cases. To do this, I filtered the to-do list by priority, and then sorted by duration. The most “quick” things were the first to be carried out, as a result, 2-3 hours after the start of the working day, I could boast of 5-6 completed urgent tasks and calmly plunged into something more labor-intensive.
What it looked like:
Conflict of interest
Situation:
- All arriving tasks by default are “important” and “urgent”
- Everyone needs everything "yesterday"
- Everyone considers their Wishlist the most important and priority
- You are "between two \ three \ four fires"
What principles guided me:
- To warn the authorities and the initiators of the tasks that you can not cope \ do not have time
- Ask the initiators of new tasks to agree with the initiators of existing ones that their tasks will be disrupted by the deadlines in favor of a new task
- Ask for advice from the boss / senior comrades which of the tasks is more urgent and more important
- If the answer is “everything urgent and important” (preferably in writing), do it at random
And in conclusion, I share my position on the lack of time:
If time is really not enough , it means you are in demand and this is good.