Twitter task start control

Twitter is used by many to tell the public about current events. Stars, politicians and ordinary people write there every day (an hour, a minute - who knows how) to show everyone their activity. Twitter is a powerful time management tool, which I’ll talk about in this article.

The microblogging format is convenient in that it does not take much time to publish a message. It can be sent absolutely always and everywhere - from a website, computer, netbook, cell. And, most importantly, it does not require special knowledge, that is, a low login threshold for users. At the moment, Twitter has not even been translated into Russian, which does not stop Russian-speaking users at all. Psychologically, reflecting their activity in writing helps in the implementation of plans. This is a confirmation of the main idea of ​​the ISO 9000 standard - "write what you do and do what you write." The same idea is being pursued by GTD time management methodology - Get things done. Anything can serve as a tool to describe your plans, from a notebook and pen to programs on a cell phone. Twitter here may well act as such a tool. Of course, there are drawbacks, for example, there are no notifications about the occurrence of events and the calendar. But Twitter wasn’t created for that.

Twitter can be considered not only as a personal tool, but also as a collective one. At enterprises, the task of notifying employees about certain events often arises. On the other hand, the manager wants to know what his subordinates are currently doing, and Twitter can help with this. In large enterprise systems (e.g. Alfresco) there is already such a thing as “status”. But there is no such important aspect as the history of statuses. That is, the head (or colleague) sees what the employee is doing at the moment, but can not see what he was doing before.

If we consider the boss-subordinate connection, the boss should always be aware of the workload of his wards and balance the load so that resources do not stand idle on the one hand and are moderately loaded on the other. The boss gives commands to his subordinates, but it does not always happen that the subordinate immediately begins to execute them. Usually there is a certain pool of tasks, having formed which and setting priorities, the leader continues to do his work. At the same time, the boss is fully confident that his subordinates perform exactly those tasks from the pool and in exactly the order in which they were planned. This confidence cannot be supported by anything if there is no tool to control the start of tasks.

Typically, managers use the following types of control:

1) daily
2) weekly
3) monthly
4) quarterly
5) annual

Each level of control is included in the next, for example, monthly reports can be generated from weekly and daily, without data loss. That is, in monthly reports, figures that were not in the daily ones can not appear in any way.

If you introduce intraday control, then the efficiency will increase significantly. Introducing intraday control of the start of tasks, we have the following advantages:

1) the subordinate will always notify the manager of the start of work in an unobtrusive way. The manager can adjust the course of work on the project even before the start of any task. For example, if an employee with a high degree of independence has announced the start of work on a task that is not very priority at the moment, the manager can, even before resources are spent, redirect such an employee to a more important task.

2) it will be physically difficult for subordinates to cheat. Each movement and each work is recorded in the registry. If something takes an unreasonably long time, this will cause suspicion and a question. If the status does not change suspiciously for a long time or does not change at all, then the employee does not work.

3) a sense of satisfaction from the completed task, written with his own hand. That is, the employee writes to himself the beginning of the task and internally begins to be absorbed only in it, not being distracted by another. The joy and increased self-esteem of the tasks performed allows us to enthusiastically solve the following. Such collecting of completed tasks can give rise to healthy competition in the team - “who will do more”, so the number of tasks completed per day will certainly increase.

4) the gradual elimination of parallel tasks, when the employee is often forced to scatter his attention in different areas of activity. Having declared a specific task, the employee will no longer be sprayed as before and will not begin to perform another task until he completes the current one. Here, the employee, as it were, promises to do the work for himself, and this feeling moves the process in the right vector. Concurrency blurs this vector, so employees who have many tasks at the same time most often have a very small percentage of completed tasks.