India’s economic development depends a lot on the working of the industrial enterprises, both in private and public sectors. Due to limited resources either financially or skilled personnel, it has been found that wastage and redundancy are a common phenomenon. So, time demands that management profession takes up the required role of developing and running robust businesses.
Managers should be held responsible for putting best practices forward like delegation, participation, leadership, management by exception etc. MBA students are considered to be the warehouse of resource management and when it comes to resources time is the biggest resource for any organization.
If we talk about time, the unique thing about it is that it is the only resource which is irreplaceable. It has three constituents – past, present and future. But unfortunately, past is considered to be dead and future is uncertain, so thoughtfully we only have control only over our present. From a management perspective, we must plan both our long term and short term activities. In an organizational system, it is the superior’s responsibility to delegate responsibility and authority in order to avoid waste of time. Following are few of the major areas where a management personnel can work regarding time management:
- Take cognizance of time: time is totally perishable and can never be revoked. Once gone it is gone forever. This realization will help you in keeping a better track of time. It always moves ahead and cannot be back traced. One cannot accumulate it like money, or add and subtract it like most of the financial resources. But the good thing is it is equally available to every human being, making it a valuable source of competitive advantage among individuals. On a rough note if a life has a span of 90 years, the time spent can be categorized into three groups – thirty years for sleep/rest, ten years in education and fifteen years to illness, old age and childhood, five years in eating, five years in essential chores/ and five years in transition. hence time has to be judiciously used if we are aware about its wastage.
- Understand time wasters: in today’s organizations, it has been identified that the biggest time wasters are unplanned work schedule, improperly directed long meetings, official dinners, unfruitful visits, unduly long discussions and indecisiveness. Ironically, the more higher level one reaches, more demanding is the time and more need for time-management.
Taking a lot of time to decide upon issues is a major time waster. One should not hesitate in changing one’s decisions if one discovers that the decision is incorrect. Another area of improvement is procrastination – postponement of activities. All successful leaders have taken action at the earliest and avoid postponing tasks that are important.
- Plan your time: planning facilitates one to organize and facilitate thoughts and taking proactive action. Enormous amount of time is wasted due to ill planning. Few of the tips to plan your time are make an aim, set your objectives clearly, work out your Key Responsibility Areas and then plan your work. Every minute spent on planning saves three in execution.
Taking a stock of time helps one analyze the reason for wastage of time. A few minutes of checking your daily schedule can save you hours of time.
- Focus on time savers: to become a master of your valuable time, one can follow a simple principle of ‘keep it short and sweet’. One that has a full hold over the problem can hit the nail on the head. To utilize time to it’s best, complete every day’s work, the same day irrespective of any reason for not doing so. If work piles up, so does pressure on your mind.
Also, to be effective in using one’s mind, individual needs to relax his mind. If you are not fresh and energetic, you would not be able to perform efficiently. In case one has too many jobs at hand, best is to note down on a piece of paper and lay down the relative priority.
Maintaining a list and diary of tasks is also an effective way to save time. One can also use the ‘Pros and Cons’ method that makes one aware of all the factors and their impact on achieving the aim. It also assists in evolving strategies through which the aim can be achieved.
- Management tools for time management: CPM (Critical Path Method) and PERT (Performance Evaluation and Review Technique) are very popular techniques of management used for planning, scheduling and controlling projects. These help in monitoring and inducing corrective measures to plan and look ahead for possible troubles. A manager commonly uses them to do work within deadlines and respect time plans.
To sum it up, since prevention is better than cure, it is becoming more and more important, especially for management personnel to take note of the time wasted and to fruitfully organize and utilize the time in order to do more in life.
