Organizing time effectively

"I am busy!". Do you keep hearing this from people around you or even saying that yourself? In a stressful world, time is the only entity keep falling short. In an ever changing world, the only thing that has remained constant is "time". In 10 decades earlier and 10 decades later, the amount of time will always remain same but as we progress through the competitive age, time seems to be shrinking down. Therefore, organising the time is the best way to balance the workload and leisure and even keep ourselves prepared for the future. Since I have been started working in an industry in different domains, across different companies, with different teams and at different places, I realised that time which is universally constant thing, feels to be different. I sooner realised that I would need to make some simple rules or discipline so as to effectively utilise the time. I am sharing those simple rules that I have made for myself for the purpose of time management. If this seems relevant, you can make your own and I am sure that you never feel the time short again!

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. Charles Darwin

Office chores

I never used to get time for some mundane office chores. I would either miss them or delay it. The reason that some unexpected tasks would just pop up and even though I'd have planned these for completion at specific hour in a day, I'd have to prioritise these unanticipated tasks and complete them. The office chores could be anything simple, such as reading mails, managing employees, daily project review, planning daily activities etc., but missing them could be dangerous sometimes. For e.g., missing to read an important email which need urgent attention and reply could be catastrophic or missing to review the project and later finding it to impede many other dependent activities.

So when I realised that these can't be afforded to miss, I followed a simple rule. I found that if I could come to office an hour or a half early, I not only can get time to finish them with absolutely no interference around but also starting early can also save some commuting time for me by avoiding traffic! Even though I couldn't afford to start early any day, following 30 minutes of "chores time" compulsorily can ensure timely completion of many dependent activities.

Meetings

Too many meetings are too bad, the same way, very few of them can be dangerous too! It is necessary to have the balance of meeting times. By following simple rule such as below, I could manage the meeting times effectively too

• Small meetings can be 15 minutes long and meetings that need more deliberation to not exceed an hour
• Prepare for meeting in advance, so that we don't waste self and others time. Many times it happens that some unprepared meetings would lead to waste of time in searching documents or content relevant for the meeting members. preparing in advance saves everybody's time.
• If not necessary, don't plan a meeting. If you think that reaching out to an individual or group of people at their desk would take less time than meeting then avoid the meeting.

Reading Books

One of my hobby of reading books was lost soon after joining the white collar job. I could rarely get time to read any. Reading books is one of the best habit of successful people. Reading not only improves your vocabulary but also improves your knowledge. I have a simple rule for reading. I have set up a target of 5 hours a week reading time on my Kindle. I track the progress and make sure that I keep up to this target. Most of my commute time, instead of seating idle, I prefer to spend in listening to music and reading books. I realised that the hobbies that I had lost, I could make up to them using just my commute time (not to mention that Bangalore traffic gives me an abundance of it! :)

Learning

In a fast paced life with ever changing technologies, it is necessary that we keep our learning lines exponentially up. People in the same domain as me and also around the technology areas would agree that today's knowledge could be stale tomorrow and so learning new things every day, every week or every year is imperative. The simple discipline that I follow to keep my learning graph up, is by setting up a target for them

• 60 minutes/week of Online Learning (on any technical topic)
• 200 minutes/week of Learning through videos or documentaries
• Proficiency in at least 4 skills or technology areas in a year

These targets are tracked either on my notes or online. Making sure I adhere to these help me get knowledge to prepare for tomorrow.

Health and Exercise

As we sharpen our brains by learning new things, it is also important to keep ourselves healthy. An healthy body is an abode to healthy mind. Keeping some target daily for exercise is good to follow. I believe the natural exercise, such as walking or doing some effortful work is better than artificial exercises on treadmills or in gym. Using public transport for commute help me get the some natural walk time daily, to and fro the office. My Apple watch has set up with a daily move goal of 400 calories, minimum 30 minutes of exercise, such as walking or running and 12 hours stand goal. This ensure that even at busy hours at office I am reminded of a quick walk or a brief movement. You can setup your goals using hundreds of app available on smartphones of these days so you are never off of your healthy goals!

Social contribution

We must give back to the society what we learnt. Most of my social activities, I keep them center around my hobbies or my work. A simple thumb rule for this is to make sure at least one write up (an article or a blog), or a contribution to non-profit forums or creating projects for students or hobbyist and publishing them online. These activities not only help me contribute to the society but also enhance my skills in many ways! There are many social medias exists today where you can in"waste" your time, but contributing to blogs, non-profit forums are good ways of "investing" your time.

Family time

After doing all these, if you see that you haven't left with any time for your family or for you to enjoy then you are certainly making some mistake. Frankly speaking I haven't made any rule or a target for "Family time"! Actually you don't have to! This is the only activity which should be unplanned and should go as that, simply because we are human and not robots. We need rules and discipline to make ourselves guided for our career and focused to success but we don't need one to enjoy our lives. My rule of thumb is enjoy the life as it comes. Make it unplanned, spend as much as you can, either by going out with your friends, or watching movies with your family or playing with your kids or helping someone. If you keep some simple rules for all the "programmable" tasks, then you would get plenty of time left to spend with family!

If you have any rules set up for yourself and you think that benefits you, please don't be shy to share them in the comments.

Written by

Santosh Ambekar,

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not reflect in any way those of the organisations or institutions of which he is a member.