Time management. How to make the most of your time and be more productive

"Yes .. I understand .. who has the time? ..who has the time? ..but if we never take the time, when will we ever have the time? "

The quote above is not from a management book but rather from Matrix Reloaded. What do the Matrix and managerial theory have in common? Probably nothing, but obviously time management is a matter that goes far beyond the working environment. So here are some food for thought for a better management of individual and other people's time.

The application of Pareto's law to time management.

If we accept the principle that the 80% of the result is obtained with the 20% of the effort and that the remaining 80% of effort produces only 20% of the result, it is evident that most of the work we have to do can be done with the 20% of effort and thus save the 80% of time.

It seems impossible? Well, read Kenneth Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager, a book that has sold over 13 million copies, has been translated into 37 languages and that only counts 112 pages.

If you are looking for the solution to a problem, you should try to take 5 minutes or less to find it. Nobody wants solutions that are complex to explain or complicated to implement, if a solution is too complex it will hardly be approved.

A methodology for managing time and email

Learning to manage activities efficiently requires a methodological approach. The approach proposed by David Allen in the book Getting things done is one of them. Personally I found it extremely useful and practical.

Why read this book

Do you have your inbox overflowing with emails? Do you have a feeling of being overwhelmed by the volume of requests or commitments? Do you have a thousand things open? Do you have too many things in mind?

David Allen has the answer for you and I try to summarize it by simplifying it a bit: If something is occupying your mind, your mind is not free and if your mind is not free it is like a computer with too many programs open: it does. hard to work. From tomorrow take your time and start writing everything you need to do. You have to describe it with a clearly written goal; you have to associate with it an action to take to carry it out and you have to save all the to-dos in a system that you access regularly. The important thing is not to keep things in mind.

So what are the main causes of wasting time?

• Do it all by yourself. Delegate what you can!
• Procrastinate, which means postponing unpleasant activities. It takes self-discipline.
• Reinventing the wheel. A few examples: create documents that already exist in other business areas or create templates from scratch when they can be downloaded from the internet
• Interrupting colleagues in what they are doing
• Giving unclear or incomplete instructions that cause errors

Good habits (according to the theory):

• Set a time for planning of the day
• Use your cooler hours to do more challenging activities
• Group activities such as phone calls and reading emails
• Prioritize the activities, first the important and urgent ones, then the urgent but not important ones and so on
• Make a list each night of the things you need to do the next day

Good habits 2.0:

• Learn to write to the keyboard at an acceptable speed, which at least allows you to write stress-free emails. You can test your skills here sense-lang.org
• Share information and documents on web applications that can be reached from any place and from any device.
• Create groups on What's app to quickly communicate with colleagues

 Tools for better time management

- Standards (policy) and procedures
“They are intended to avoid making continuous decisions relating to situations of a repetitive nature. They do not establish what should be done, but how to do it in the fastest way. " V. Kettkliz
They also allow you to make quick decisions about topics and how to deal with them.

- The standards

Standards are the shared modality for the realization of documents, procedures, projects and other business activities. The common way of carrying out a work allows the evaluation, sharing and realization itself in more rapid times.

- The guidelines

The guidelines are the analogue of the standard, but at the level of behavior at all stages of the work. By regulating the direction of the work, it also saves time when you have to make a decision and ask yourself what is the most appropriate way to proceed in that situation and in that company.

Below is the diagram of how our energies are distributed throughout the day: around 10:00 am we are more active, so we should take advantage of this moment for the most demanding tasks. While at the end of the day, when we are more tired, it is better to focus on less demanding issues.