We all need to manage our time and workloads at work, so here are ten tips to help you do so effectively.
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
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Almost every task that a teacher is expected to perform on a daily basis falls into one of six categories. Some of these duties—such as lesson planning, classroom management, and assessment—are so critical that they are used by teacher assessment tools to evaluate teacher effectiveness. The 3, 6, 9 Time Management Strategy. Nikola Tesla said that, 'If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.' I am about to share with you a simple time management strategy. One that has had a tremendous impact on my efficiency since the day I first innovated & implemented it. Just because an online task management software doesn’t have the features you want, doesn’t mean it won’t be there tomorrow. The best task management software companies are constantly iterating and releasing new features on a regular basis. Use these tips to help you find the right task management software for your personal projects. Nov 21, 2013 6) The one essential habit you must form for this—or any other task management system— to work is to perform a review of your tasks board each morning. Ryan Carson recommends taking 19 minutes.
Join For Free2do 2 0 1 download free. Our daily lives revolve around a certain number of tasks that we identify along the way to achieve our ambitions and SMART goals. In the struggle to be at the top of our game and retaining our competitive edge, we often bite more than we can chew.
Although everything seems of high priority, something goes amiss in this race of getting things done and keeping your head. Some of us create a long to-do list to accomplish – before a certain time period or a certain age. Others spend so much time perfecting a single task that by the time it shines, it is obsolete.
Workload balancing and time management skills are not only associated with project managers or bosses. In fact, these skills need to be adopted on each level especially working in a team. If not, it can cause dire consequences for a project altogether.
According to a study by Cornerstone, work overload decreases productivity by 68% in employees who feel they do not have enough hours in the day to complete their tasks. So, what are the essential task management skills that we all need to be effective and efficient, simultaneously?
Regardless of where you stand in the organization hierarchy or personal accomplishments, this blog is for you. Here is a list of handpicked skills that you can work with today to accomplish your milestones without them getting the better of you.
1. Make To-Do Lists
To-do lists are classic, yet powerful and effective more than ever today. Back in the day, people kept handwritten notes for ideas and things to get done. They are like your everyday essentials and add to your effective task management skills.
Now, people have smart to-do list apps that give out notifications and reminders before the task is due. It is easier than ever before to jot down ideas in the form of images, voice notes, text and so much more.
Shivani Siroya is the CEO of Tala, a microloan startup. Siroya states: “I’ve figured out how to make all these digital systems work for me, but I have to admit, at the end of the day, a list on paper still feels the most useful.”
Make it a habit to arrange a list of things to do. Also, make use of the many free and premium to-do list apps that will help you do just that.
2. Prioritize
Understandably, not everything on your to-do list needs to be done right away. Yes, there are some great ideas that can help you take your game a notch up. However, it is important to establish what is important at a specific instance.
Michael Mankins is a Bain & Company partner and co-author of “Time, Talent and Energy”, a CMI Management Book of the Year. According to Mankins, “Liberating time requires eliminating low-value activities altogether, not merely capturing them on a list,” he stresses.
Take help from the BCG matrix, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your projects as well as the opportunities and threats it is facing. Once clear with what matters at the time, you can define the importance of the tasks better.
3. Schedule
Scheduling tasks is a great task management skill and keeps the team focused on what is at hand without going off track worrying about other tasks. However, staying on track is a major struggle in itself.
Did you know that according to a study, a person wastes about 21.8 hours a week? Professionals are more or less affected by distractions that seem harmless at the moment but result in major setbacks later. These distractions include phone usage and small talk.
According to a study by Udemy, more than a third of millennials and Gen Z (36%) say they spend two hours or more checking their smartphones during the workday.
Next, make a schedule and allot start and due dates. By assigning a due date to a task, we tend to be more aware of the cost it incurs, both monetary and time wise.
One of the best ways is to go Agile. Create backlogs and assign it to a sprint. This also gives a better perspective on the time required for each task completion.
4. Be Flexible
Holding your stance is a great quality to embody if you want to achieve milestones and deadlines. However, some instances and situations require revisiting already made decisions. Being flexible is #4 on our list of the top task management skills.
This can be due to a sudden change in the market trends, change in customer drive or if a certain task appears to overshadow others.
Any of these factors, if not acknowledged on time, can strip a team of potential chances of success and growth. It is important to be on the lookout for likely loopholes of if another opportunity seems to be passing us by. Be flexible with deadlines when you need to be.
As stated by Osman Khan, CEO, and co-founder of the online auction house, Paddle8, in a Forbes interview,” In the right roles and with the right people, flex does offer tremendous productivity improvement.
It gives people time to process properly, and it gets them out of the office in terms of being bogged down in day-to-day admin. So, there is more thought leadership that comes to the table, and that’s where your creativity and innovation come in.”
5. Manage Change
Being open to change is important but mastering the how-to of it is equally important. Most of the times, we are unable to drive the change needed for a certain project or in our strategy.
However, this skill can help increase the chances that your project meets its objectives 6 times more than with poor change management.
With the Scrum methodology, you can be open to and manage change easily through the daily Scrum meetings. The daily scrum gives you an opportunity to not only have an overview on the tasks being done but also the bottlenecks they may face. This way you can alter backlogs to better suit the changing requirements.
6. Delegate
Being over-burdened is a real thing and if not addressed well, it can significantly affect productivity. By the end of the day, we are only humans working with other humans. Each of us holds a unique set of qualities when it comes to patience, resilience, working under pressure, or getting a task done in the least amount of time.
According to Eli Broad, philanthropist and founder of 2 Fortune 500 companies, “The inability to delegate is one of the biggest problems I see with managers at all levels.” Hence, it is downright crucial, to not only be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses but those of your team, too.
When you stay vigilant, you can better analyze who can better help out at a certain stage. One of the best task management skills is to know how to delegate tasks, to the right person.
This opens windows for the other person to experiment and grow as well, which leads to growth in your team.
7. Be Involved
After helping the team sort out their priorities and delegating critical tasks, leaving the arena is a complete no-no. Setting up a team and schedule is great for success, but it also needs to be consistently followed up on.
If a project requires a daily scrum meeting, increasing workload or approaching deadlines can lead teams to give it a back seat. This may often lead the management to stay aloof in hopes that the team will suffice by itself. In reality, this is the time to be more involved than ever before.
Did you know that according to a study by the University of Ottawa, 33% of projects fail because of a lack of involvement from senior management?
Instead of micromanaging, be present and reachable if the team needs you. In order to make the most of your plans, prioritization, and scheduling ensure that all steps are followed by everyone in the team. This includes stakeholders and clients.
8. Be Patient
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At times things may not go as planned causing us unprecedented setbacks. As per a study by Wellington, only 37% of teams in the U.K. reported completing projects on time more often than not. It is only human to feel overwhelmed and experience a dip in your morale at such times.
By mastering the art of patience, you can get through difficult situations and help your team get back on its feet sooner as well.
As Jack Ma, entrepreneur and founder of Alibaba says, “The very important thing you should have is patience.”
9. Communicate
The importance of communication has been reiterated on numerous channels on a variety of levels throughout the years. However, statistics prove that this is an area where professionals, even managers, lack skills in.
The anomaly here is that despite the criticality of this skill, proven time and again, professionals choose to look the other way when it comes to communication. Whether it is your personal task management or project milestones to be achieved in a team, people seldom decide to state their mind. This is where team collaboration software plays a vital role in ensuring smooth communication between the concerned parties.
Fear of seeming incompetent, lack of availability by managers, and playing the blame game are some of the bland reasons why the most important information goes amiss. This can lead to major setbacks, in the long and short run.
According to David Grossman, in “The Cost of Poor Communications,” a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each stated an average loss of $62.4 million per year (per company) due to insufficient communication among employees.
10. Be Tech Savvy
Having the right ammunition can win you battlefields. The same goes for battling workload balancing and time tracking. Technology has paved way for many startups to become market giants and has built billionaires. Pigments 1 1 1 – polychrome software synthesizer.
The right tool at the right time can render wonders for your personal and professional life. Task management skills may have a lot to do with on our personal traits and qualities but adopting the right task management tool can raise chances of success exponentially.
Be sure, to research and choose the right task management apps for you and your team.
Some of the free project management tools you can consider today are nTask, Asana, Trello, Wrike and more. However, be practical and adopt tools according to what is feasible, not just what is reining the market, keeping in mind finances, learning curve and team requirements.
You can start with free task management and productivity apps, and upgrade along the way.
Which task management skills have helped you manage your workload? Share your story and lend us some tips in the comments below.
tips,skills,time management,workload,task management,dev career,agile
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< Seven Habits Study Guide
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
The first three habits, 1. be proactive, 2. begin with and end in mind, and 3. put the first thing first, are grouped together in a category called private victory. Private victories are personal and relate to you as an individual person. In contrast, the following three habits are grouped together as habits geared towards public victory, and are related to your social success and in working effectively with others.
Habit 1: Be Proactive[edit]
'There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living' – David Starr Jordan.
Being pro-active is the opposite of being re-active. Both are active, but the first is coming from an inner impulse inside yourself, powered by own desires, while the latter is reacting to outer circumstances. The worst case of being reactive is only acting on outer stimulus without any inner reflection, drive or initiative. Cultivating this initiative is achieved by taking full responsibility for your own life, by becoming response-able – able to choose your response to the world from the inside, before the world is showing you, that you have to act.The space inside of us between stimulus and response is the space of our freedom to choose, to chose our response. It is what makes us human, and not stimulus-response animals. We are able to choose our reaction. The saying of 'Act or be acted upon' illustrates this point.
The Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence.[edit]
The Circle of Concern are all areas in life that we are concerned with, that we have 'on our radar', may it be our health, our children, the national debt or global warming. The Circle of Influence are those areas inside the circle of concern, that you actually can do something about now. My favorite example is the bad news on TV. Usually you can do absolutely nothing about it and you won’t do anything except saying 'Oh look how bad this is'. Why should you pollute your mind with it and distract your focus to something you are helpless with? Can you see how futile and self-defeating this is?
If you are proactive, you choose to focus only on matters and situations where you actually have the ability and standing to influence. When faced with a situation within your Circle of Influence, you can choose to act, be in control, and accomplish something of value. Making this choice to engage proactively also increases and strengthens your Circle of Influence, while ignoring or avoiding it can diminish it.
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind[edit]
'What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us' – Oliver Wendell Holmes.
This habit is based on the principle of Personal Leadership, which means that you decide what you want and that you lead yourself in the direction you choose. There are always two creations of everything that we do. The first of the creations is mental, in our heads and not yet materialized. This is what the second habit is about. The second creation is in the material world. This is what the third habit is about.Beginning with the end in mind says that we need to develop a vision, a clear picture of what we choose to be and create in our lifetime. Stephen illustrates this succinctly by suggesting that you write your own funeral speech! What kind of person have you been, what did you stand for, what did you create? What were your contributions to the people you love and what difference have you made in their lives?This is a fantastic visualization exercise that connects us deeply with ourselves and it is the perfect illustration of Begin with the End in Mind. Having such a personal vision rooted in our own values acts like a guidance-system. That is what the habit does: if you think from the end, you become like Michelangelo in the great metaphor of sculpting the statue of David out of a block of stone, where he simply cut off the pieces of stones that were still in the way of his vision to materialize.
Habit 3: First things first[edit]
'First Things First
'Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least' – Wolfgang von Goethe.
The third habit is where you make your plan happen – where you develop an action-plan and execute it in the best way possible. While the second habit is the Leadership habit, this is the Management habit. And you do this in an effective way by setting priorities for the most important things first. Then you work on these first things until they are done. You exercise your discipline powered by your vision and goals where you know what you have to do to create this vision into reality. It is to really live your decisions, to walk your talk.There are several tools here that can improve walking your talk. Setting the right priorities is one of the most important tasks. To set priorities, you first have to execute habit one and two of course, because otherwise – as Stephen also explains it – it happens to you that your ladder of success is leaning toward the wrong wall. If you have not taken full responsibility and clearly decided what you want in life, the priorities you set cannot have a deeper meaning to you. It just does not happen by accident. So choose proactively what you want first, then create an action-plan, set priorities and act on them.
Time Management[edit]
One of the most helpful things in execution is to effectively manage the time that we have available. There are four core areas where we spend our time, visualized as a quadrant, and you can categorize each task on a) Importance and b) Urgency:
A task is important or not important and it is urgent or not urgent:
Ghosttile 1 1 1. 1. Quadrant of DEMAND – important and urgentThis is usually the core of a busy person, tasks that are important and also urgent, you just can not put them off and they have to be done now. It is important and should be well executed.
2. Quadrant of THE ZONE – important but not urgentThis is where you plan, improve, develop, build relationships and see opportunities. It is the basis for real success and the heart of leadership.
3. Quadrant of ILLUSION – not important but urgentThe quadrant of illusion is a serious problem in personal management because it deludes you into thinking that the tasks you do are important. However, they are only made urgent by demands from outside agents or by wrong judgments of yourself. In reality, they have no profound impact on your achievements at all.
4. Quadrant of ESCAPE – not important and not urgentThis is the area you need to avoid altogether if you are interested in success. It is the escape from what matters by distraction, because of fear, irresponsibility or fuzzy goals.
What you need to do is move as much time as possible into The Zone (Quadrant II) and spend the rest of time in Quadrant I, the important and urgent demands. What you can do to raise awareness of your tasks is make a list of all tasks you do over the day or week. Then put all tasks honestly to the quadrant where you really spend your time doing them. Remember that it serves no purpose at all to be nice to yourself here, total honesty to yourself is always the most empowering thing you really can do. Then get rid of tasks in quadrant III and IV (not important) as soon as possible and move into Quadrant I and II. The best managers spend at least 50% of their time in Quadrant II and those are the most effective.
If you are really overwhelmed by Quadrant I and also III tasks (urgent), here is what you can do:• Do less: Say 'No' more often, focus more on the most important tasks, your highest priorities, do less better! • Delegate more: give tasks to people who can do it better, are more efficient, more qualified or more suitable for the task than you. • Go into The Zone to create more resources for the urgent matters or lessen the urgency by better preparation and proactive planning.
Please also take a look at my later article: A Beginners Guide to Time Management. These were the three habits for private victory as described by Stephen Covey. I think they are principles in fact. They are like natural laws for personal development and effectiveness. I’m looking forward to hearing your views and experiences with these three habits! What kind of successes or disappointments have you dealt with? Share them in the comments, I will also join in and answer questions of course.
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
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