Time should be on your side
I started deeply research the topic of effective time usage about 3 years ago, since I had to manage IT offshoring office from scratch. And you definitely know, it’s always hard to sit on 2, even 3 chairs at the same time. Especially when it’s the “startup” stage of any project. So as usual you are working about 12-14 hours, always in a rush and can’t measure how productive are you. It’s called “reactive management”, when any fire appeards on the horizons you are running to bring a lit bit water.
Surprisingly the solution was found and that solutions was pretty simple. I found out that “Time is not on my side“. To recognize a problem – is probably the right first step to solve it.
I started my TM study from 2 interesting books that I highly advice to read:
- Get things done by David Allen
- Time drive by Gleb Arhangelskiy
Than I check a month period to practice a lot of techniques that will help me to be more effective in time usage.
Also it’s common fact that:
To create good/bad habbit you need to repeat this action during 24 days.
So the list of quite effective TM actions that helped me a lot:
- planning of the day/week
- bla-bla
- bla-bla
- bla-bla
After about 4-6 weeks I found for my self 2 simple metrics that you can measure your effectiveness in time usage. As always these metrics are very simple:
- Numeral comparison. You can compare number of tasks you have done last week to number of tasks done this week. Or it might number of tasks covered during day/project has been done on time etc
- Job satisfaction. It’s when you feel satisfaction after end of working day/week, because you are easily covering “shit loads” of work and spend less energy for it
After some time I decided to make a small workshop for my colleauges (software developers) to share my practical experience of “1 month TM practicing“. Furthermore I gave couple of lectures to other IT guys from other offices.
Presentation you can find below. I found it very interesting and decided to share information with you. I’d like to thank Mr. Etienne, the author of this presentation who kindly allowed me to share it with you.
PS: If you want to find a “ready pill” how to get things done in 1 day. I will upset you a little – there is not such kind of “pill”. It’s continious process and you should always come back to results and measure what’s time aspects of your life (not only at working hours) can be improved.
Let’s time will be on your side!
