Scheduling is the art of planning your activities so that you can achieve your goals and priorities in the time you have available. It helps you:
- Understand what you can realistically achieve with your time.
- Add contingency time for "the unexpected."
- Avoid taking on more than you can handle.
- Work steadily toward your personal and career goals.
- Achieve a good work-life balance.
Set a regular time to do your scheduling.
Decide on a scheduling tool to use to organize your time. You can use pen and paper or choose an app.
Start by establishing the time you want to make available for your work.
How much time you spend at work should reflect the design of your job and your personal goals in life.
Block in the actions you absolutely must do. These will often be the things you are assessed against.
Schedule in high-priority and urgent activities, as well as essential maintenance tasks that cannot be delegated or avoided.
Try to arrange the high-priority tasks for the times of day when you feel most productive.
Schedule some extra time to cope with contingencies and emergencies.
Some interruptions will be hard to predict, but leaving some open space in your schedule gives you the flexibility you need to rearrange tasks and respond to important issues as they arise.
The space you have left in your planner is "discretionary time". Use it to deliver your priorities and achieve your goals.
- Review your prioritized To-Do List and personal goals.
- Evaluate the time you need to achieve them.
- Schedule them in.
If you have little discretionary time available, question whether all of the tasks you've entered are necessary. Some tasks can be delegated or tackled in a more time-efficient way.
If you find that your discretionary time is still limited, then you may need to renegotiate your workload or ask for help.
SIMILAR ARTICLES
When you take notes, you need to filter external information, summarize it in your head, and then write it down.
Your brain decides which pieces of information to hang onto for later, partly as a result of how much work you do to them upfront–so the more you mentally manipulate a piece of information, the better you’ll remember it.
... instead of task management.
Task management is more effective than time management because these tasks come with clear limits which make them easier to manage. You know when you’ve started work on a project -- and you know when you’ve completed the job. It’s one limited thing at a time.
To achieve your retirement goals and objectives – you need to have the right amount of corpus to take care of your regular needs post retirement.