deepstash
Beta
Why Preparation is Better Than Planning - Time Management Ninja
Tips to help you with preparation
- Do it the night before. It can help you so that you don't have to scramble, for instance, to find clothes or to look for a missing item.
- When possible, do it well in advance. It will sort out unforeseen issues.
- Do the pre-work. Read the materials, Review the data. Practice the activity so that you are ready.
- Preparing saves you time. It reduces errors, prevents re-work, and shortens activities.
- Reduce your stress. When you are ready, you feel confident. Your stress is reduced because you have less to worry about.
- Make it a habit. Make it part of your lifestyle.
26 SAVES
78 READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
6
Key Ideas
Boss-mode vs worker-mode
Knowledge workers usually have to play 2 roles at the same time - the boss and the worker: They have to choose what their work is (boss-mode) and they have to do the actu...
Limited attention
Your attention is a limited resource and you have to be careful where you are spending it.
If you choose to give away 80 percent of your attention to meetings, you will have 20 percent of your attention just for dealing with a few emails feeling overwhelmed.
Levels of attention
- Proactive attention: you are fully focused and prepared for your most important decisions/ most complex tasks.
- Active attention: you're plugged in, but also easily distracted.
- Inactive attention: you're likely to really struggle with complex or difficult tasks.
5
Key Ideas
Prerequisites for Effective Time Management
Trying to apply time management tools without having prerequisite time management skills is unlikely to work effectively. The prerequisites are:
- Awareness about time being a limited reso...
Steps To Improve Time Management
The way to improve your Time Management skills requires us to figure out where to focus. This can be done by:
- Getting an objective self-assessment done by your peers or boss, or establishing a baseline behavior to measure your performance against.
- Understanding that it is your skills, not your personality or preferences that can be developed to provide the best results.
- Identifying the key skill(s) that you need to prioritize, and avoiding spreading yourself too thin.
Developing Awareness Skills
The key factor to consider when developing awareness skills is that effectiveness (doing things well) is as important as efficiency (doing things fast).
- Find which time of the day is your 'peak performance time.
- Treat time as money, a limited resource, and create a 'time budget' for your to-do list.
- Measure and evaluate the projected time vs the actual time taken.
- Consider which of the tasks create follow-up tasks that take up your time later.
- Take into consideration the 'opportunity cost' of spending time in an activity.
10
Key Ideas
What Time Management Is
Time is our precious resource. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value.
...
Eat That Frog!
Your “frog” is your most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.
If you have two important tasks, start your day with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first. Focus on completing it before you go to the next one.
Failure to execute
We tend to confuse activity with accomplishment: we attend endless meetings and make plans, but at the end of the day, no one does the job and gets the results required.
“Failure to execute” is among the biggest problems in organizations today.