How to respect time or how to become an effective team leader

Do I need to manage time?

If you have never asked this question, then you probably have problems with the organization of the work process.

When you work in the field of IT, you must certainly know how to set tasks correctly, in what sequence to fulfill them, to whom and what can be delegated, and what should be postponed, all this concerns not only team leaders, but also every employee who must be able to understand that heap of tasks that the leader set for him. After all, the correct organization of working time is an unconditional indicator of effectiveness.

The higher the efficiency of using working time, the faster and more qualitatively any project can be completed. As we know time is money, and time saved is money earned for the company and, accordingly, for itself. If you are a manager or just aim for leaders, I hope I convinced you why one of the most important qualities of a leader is the ability to manage his time and the time of the whole department.

Most likely, some of you unknowingly apply certain principles in practice to some extent, or have already begun to use tools to manage time. But what would seem so obvious is actually not so simple.

Let's deal with terms and tools

You can feel the time on yourself only when you set certain points of reference, and when it is measured by segments.

One of the most important terms is the capital of time , this is all the time that is available to us to perform future tasks, i.e. it is a kind of countdown, and you need to understand that it is limited.

The second such term will be time budgeting , i.e. the allocation of a period of time to perform a task.

David Allen is a pioneer in the field of time management, and in his book “Getting things done” he coined the term GTD (bring your tasks to the end).

The main thesis of this book is that all the cases coming to you need to be registered, everything - it means everything without a trace. You can complete the tasks later, but you need to register them immediately as they appeared. After you have formed a “dump” of such tasks, you must begin to solve them.

To do this, take the following steps

• Choose. It is necessary to determine everything that you must do.
• Analyze. For each task, it is necessary to determine what the next step will be. If the task requires no more than a couple of minutes, then it is better to do it right away. For longer tasks, it is necessary to determine an adequate time for solving this task, or to delegate it, if possible.
• Organize. All important meetings must be recorded on the calendar. Transfer all other tasks to the list of tasks for the future. The least urgent tasks need to be stored in the “someday I will do” list.
• Conduct a review. Every day you need to view the list of tasks and the calendar. Weekly, you need to view a list of projects, future tasks, and delegated tasks.
• Do It. Complete the task given its time, importance, as well as the energy spent.
• Have a rest. All that has not been done will surface on the next review.

And now I want to go to the task registration tools. The most important thing to remember is that the head is not such a tool. And at the moment there are many offers of task managers and calendars on the market (I won’t advertise anything), everyone can decide for themselves, in extreme cases, you can use the daily log.

One of the tools for determining the type of tasks is the Eisenhower matrix

A) Urgent and important matters. These are urgent problems, critical situations, etc. If tasks began to appear here, it most likely means that you did not overlook something in the other quadrants. The situation was lost out of control, either because of laziness, or because of shortsightedness. Naturally, if you constantly solve such problems, you can burn out very quickly. And all your free time will be occupied by tactical tasks, and there will be no time to think about the strategy.

B) Important, but not urgent.It will have the most promising and permanent tasks, their prevention, strengthening ties and relationships, new opportunities. If most of your tasks are in this quadrant, it means that you are on the right track. Being in it, you form good habits in yourself, systematic solution of tasks, efficiency, and of course with time you better see the future and the expediency of solving various kinds of tasks.

C) Urgent, but unimportant tasks. They distract you from the main business, these are the very unexpected assignments that throw you at work. And interfere with focus on important goals. These are usually delegated activities. This can also include meetings, because often the majority of people who are there do not play a major role, or are not needed there at all.

D) Non-urgent and unimportant matters. These tasks are useless and you need to deal with them in the last turn, but we deal with them in the first place. This is what distracts us, pleasant activities, they are also called time eaters. This may include social. networks, web surfing and the like.
The conclusion suggests itself, you need to keep yourself in quadrant B and devote as little time as possible to quadrant D.

So that it was always necessary to use a certain tool - a decision-making system.

There are two parameters: time consumption (T) and energy consumption (E) , each of them is evaluated on a 10-point scale and is considered so T + E / 2 and we get the cost of solving our problem.

Next to them are added two more parameters: the results now (R1) - that’s all, the useful things that bring profit now and the potentially predicted result (R2) - that’s all that we see the prospects of the task, are also evaluated by 10- point scale and it is considered so R1 + R2 / 2 and we get the effectiveness of our task. And to get the value of our task, we divide the results into costs.

There are undoubted advantages of this system, we will have a notion of the value of the case, emphasis on the main thing, and we will learn to clarify the value of our cases and it is also possible to identify cases that can be entrusted. There are also minuses, subjectivity, and of course, focus on one’s affairs and on oneself as a whole is added.

Further I want to focus on the Pareto principle (20/80)

Its essence lies in the fact that by choosing the minimum of the most important actions, you can quickly get a significant part of the planned full result, and further improvements may be ineffective and not justified.

Do first those tasks whose highest performance

Surely you had such that while you were busy solving one problem, other smaller and seemingly urgent tasks were falling on you, for which you immediately clutch, postponing the main task, as a result, the effectiveness of your work decreases, and the result will be quite not what is expected of you. In this case, you can revise the priority of tasks and transfer part to other employees, as well as appoint a person in charge.

And of course you need to mention Brian Tracy, with his frog principle

Its essence is that the most unpleasant thing for us to do first of all , and then take on other things and for us they will be less unpleasant and, accordingly, with more willingness we will fulfill them. A vivid example is the maintenance of technical documentation and reports.

The next principle introduced by experts is the principle of eating an elephant

Any business can be done slowly, i.e. we are cutting a big deal into small tasks that will not cost us much effort , and we will systematically do them, and in the end a big task will be solved. Although of course she will eat a lot of time, but most importantly, the big and difficult task will be completed.

When a new project starts, the final goal is often known, although it is often the case that it is not known, but here is how to get to it. First of all, it is very important to stage-by-stage planning of the project due to the breakdown into small tasks, it is very important to clearly distribute the responsibilities between developers, it is important to assign a responsible person and give specific deadlines for an oral report on the result in order to understand that everything is going in the right direction, you also need to clearly set the task not only the team as a whole, but also make sure that everyone understands their task one hundred percent, especially for new employees.

Next, I want to talk about what an important principle is - the ability to say polite “no”

And the main idea of this principle - you must not deny a person, namely the problem. You can make a list of such tasks, and enter things that do not bring any benefit and only distract us from achieving really important things.

If it’s hard for you to refuse people, for example, you understand that asking for a person will not bring anything for you personally, that’s a fairly simple way: take a break, decide for yourself whether you will fulfill the request of the person and only then give an answer. Well, the asker must understand that when he asks, he may be refused.

Well, when we talk about time management, it is necessary to mention who steals our time.

Talk about the devourers of our time

Dan Kennedy called them vampires and established a hierarchy for them.

• The most insidious of them is the vampire minute , i.e. these are insignificant requests, seemingly worthless to you, but stealing precious time from you. Of course, in the work, say HelpDesk, it is impossible to postpone urgent tasks, but in your personal life you need to look at similar problems.
  
  
• Next comes the vampire nonsense , its goal is to confuse you and distract you from essential tasks.

You need to fight it by weighing for yourself whether this task will lead you to anything.

• The vampire door is open , when colleagues from different departments come to you that distract you, they can steal a lot of your time.
  
  
• A vampire phone is constantly distracting calls, notifications, and the like.

A good way to deal with it is to naturally turn it off when you need to focus on an important task.

• Vampire non-punctuality , you need to demand from other people respect for your time.
  
  
• Vampire crowd , it means following others and doing how they do. You need to avoid it, try not to give in to it and follow your schedule.
  
  
• Vampire aimlessness , things that are done without purpose.
  
  
• A vampire whiner is an excuse for his failures.

And of course, these are not all the devourers of our time, there is also the performance of someone else's work , and attempts to do too much at a time , and poor planning of the working day and much more.

Now I want to mention that it is necessary to reduce the time to complete tasks and force yourself to complete the tasks accumulated earlier. Before you begin to perform tasks, you need to reduce the amount of time to complete them .

And one of such effective systems is Kaizen , it teaches you to increase the amount of effective time and teaches how to organize your workspace .

In Russian, it sounds like 5C:

• Sort: you need to get rid of the unnecessary.
• Follow the order: identify each thing in its place.
• Keep your workplace clean.
• Standardize workplace cleanliness procedures.
• Improve order: stimulate its maintenance.

For example, a data center engineer needs to install a new server or replace an existing one, he takes a server with him, takes a slide to it, when it comes to the rack it turns out that he forgot the key, puts the server, the slide, returns for the key, took the key, opened the rack, dismounts the old the server puts the slide for the new one, already tired, starts to mount the server and it turns out that these slides do not fit it.
Due to seemingly nonsense, a significant amount of time was spent.

And further, say the enikeyschik needs to install the program for the user, he goes through the entire office, inserts the USB flash drive into the computer, frantically searches for the desired program in the folders “new folder”, “new folder (2)”, “123”, ”qwerty”. He opens the “distrib” folder, it turns out to be empty, he takes out a flash drive, runs to his nightstand after another flash drive, after ten steps, he realizes that he gave the flash drive to Petya, who is sick today. And he understands that the necessary program can now only be downloaded, and he returns to his workplace, on the way another user puzzles him with another problem, and this can continue indefinitely. As a result, the man worked all day, but everyone was not satisfied, including himself.

After these examples, I would like to convey the idea thatthe organization of the workspace is very important for the effective work of the company and the company's management should cultivate the right principles of work among employees at different levels.

We learned everything that is necessary for the proper organization of working time. And it’s right to collect tasks and prioritize these tasks, as well as to struggle with what distracts us from them, and how to save time for their solution. And finally, you can begin to implement them.

Now we will analyze the methods by which you can and should force yourself to perform certain tasks

There is an interesting method “tomato principle” - to complete a task, you need to take a 25 minute period of time in which you are not supposed to be distracted from the task, then take a short break, again 25 minutes, then again a short break and thus you cut the files, to be completed.

The next method is the pie of time , its essence in the classification of working time, because it is no secret that most of our affairs are almost monotonous and daily. So, you can start to conduct a time tracker of our tasks, its goal will be to determine what our time is spent on and to optimize it in the future and find out if you spend time on unnecessary tasks or you don’t have any where to unload yourself and what to refuse.
A very useful thing for newcomers to the company, or vice versa for especially busy guys.

Our next step is tools.

• An anchor is a preparation for a task, and it is advisable to prepare yourself unconsciously.
• Sharpening a pencil is the preparation of tools in such a way as not to be distracted by their search, so that they are all at hand.
• Hole cheese - any task needs to be performed by small "bites" or steps.
• Reward yourself - in the end you need to reward yourself, naturally, the reward must be adequate to the task.

And a little about uncertain tasks

Работа в неопределенных условиях – когда задача до конца нам не понятна, но за нее необходимо браться и в дальнейшем мы получаем какие-либо дополнения или уточнения для ее выполнения и не всё будет известно заранее.

Такого рода задачи характерные для руководителей проектов, и в принципе для высокого менеджмента. И для выполнения такого рода задач необходимо корректировать свой первоначальный план при получении новых деталей , не нужно думать если к вам поступила не определённая задача, то и план для ее решения будет неопределённый и корректировать его не нужно.

Следует составлять адекватный план такой задаче и при получении новых деталей корректировать план, либо вообще его менять.

Ну и необходимо подвести обобщение, чтобы выполнять сваливающиеся на нас задачи

The main thing is that you need to draw up the correct regime of the day and know your strengths and weaknesses , everything must be done systematically, even in small steps. And even a difficult business will become familiar to you, but in the end it may even be pleasant. And knowing yourself helps a lot in making all sorts of decisions .

At the initial stage, special attention should be paid to time eaters, and it is necessary to cultivate good habits. Rewards and punishments, public promises - are needed for motivation to perform various tasks

So we have come to an end . In this short article, I set myself the task of not only telling you a lot of information on this topic, but encouraging you to take your time and start respecting it if you are not already doing this.


References used in the article:

- Kelly McGonigal “Willpower”
- Dan Kennedy “Tough Time Management”
- Brian Tracy “Eat a Frog!” 21 Ways to Learn to Do ”
- David Allen“ Getting Things Done ”