The standard middle manager and manager in the office, as a rule, always look extremely tired and loaded with business. This man heroically works twelve hours a day and six, and sometimes even seven days a week. Of course, he thinks that everything rests on him and that he is the best specialist.
When such people see a person who works thirty hours a week, they usually think that he does nothing. The formula that if you do not work many hours, you will not be successful and achieve nothing, is imposed by society and firmly settled in our minds.
In this article, we will tell you about the principles of time management and explain why instant messengers are the main evil of the modern world.
Why managing your time is important
If you are, for example, an SMM manager who has a maximum of three tasks for the whole day, then your planning system will fit on one sheet of a notebook. You can even use a paper diary or notebook notes. There you can write that today you have to write a couple of posts and buy Instagram likes to help promote the account. And if you have a hundred tasks hanging, and at that moment another hundred come, then you need a scheduling system.
Otherwise, you will work several times more, with the same or worse productivity. It is possible that at some point you simply will not be able to perform new tasks anymore and go crazy. After that, you will no longer be able to write high-quality posts and will only buy likes on Instagram.
How to plan
You should learn time management early in your career. An efficient employee hour tracker can help you and your employees manage time better. If you are a leader, then you should see the moment when the number of lazy employees in your company began to exceed the number of really healthy guys, and fire part of the team in time one day. You will probably have to work for the departed workers for several months.
But in a few days, you will realize that you will survive this period if you become productive. If you do not develop clear principles for the distribution of your time, then it will be difficult for you to cope with problems.
Why messengers are the universal evil
The smartphone has become a part of us, and social networks and messengers have become the main communication tool. And so it is worth talking about them separately. Very often you can observe the following picture: a person is working, doing something on his laptop, and every 20-30 seconds he sees a notification on his phone.
He takes it, sometimes he answers right away, sometimes not, but every time he is distracted. At this moment, he thinks that he is a hero because he works, decides something, constantly communicates with someone at work, and so on.
In fact, in this mode, it is simply impossible to work productively. Messengers are very annoying and very difficult to ignore. The notification will find you on the screen of a smartphone, tablet, computer, or watch, and soon it will probably come directly to the brain. Perhaps the main problem is that the message cannot be marked unread, you are forced to respond instantly.
When you dive into a task, you need 10-15 minutes to fully engage in work, followed by 30-40 golden minutes of productivity, in which your productivity multiplies. This is the only way you should work. In full concentration and without distractions. When you work in a noisy environment where outside sounds cannot be avoided, such as at an airport, you can use noise-canceling headphones (without music).
Previously, the function of the messenger was performed by colleagues
If your co-workers have a habit of just walking up to you and starting to talk, forget about being productive. This is even worse than the messenger because it completely distracts you from the task. Every time someone comes up to you, he completely switches you to a discussion of what purpose he came for.
If your manager organizes a chat for every task, he is wrong
Now it’s probably fashionable. If some problem/ task/project arises, then the manager immediately creates a chat in the messenger, immediately sends something there, adds everyone who should work on this task, and also those who should be aware, and those whom he deems necessary.
After that, if you do not write something in the next couple of hours, then you are considered an inefficient employee. As a result, this leads to a huge number of useless discussions of various insignificant tasks. It is reminiscent of a planning meeting for 10-15 people, where two people are talking, and the rest do not understand why they came. This is the perfect example of a showcase of work in the complete absence of any activity.
Chat on a task in a messenger is just a stream of information that cannot be structured and controlled. This method is ideal only to depict an activity and then blame someone for not reading some comment at some point and not doing some task at the same second.
Stickers and diaries are not effective
There are many people who cover the whole monitor with stickers of different colors, and in case they run out of space, they stick them on the keyboard and the table. Most likely, they have a paper diary and even more than one. For them, the main thing is that everyone can see how busy they are with work, because if they have two hundred stickers on the monitor, then it is clear to everyone that they really work.
They are delighted with their planning system and consider themselves very organized. In fact, this is the worst example of bad planning, and people like that need to be disposed of.
In today’s world, a task cannot be written on a small piece of paper, because often you need to add a time, a place, a link, a few links, and additional tasks.
Even if you could write it all down in your diary, when the event is rescheduled, you will have to rewrite it all. Many events will repeat weekly, every Monday, in some place, and so on. It’s just impossible to organize it in the form of stickers and paper diaries.
Also, you should have access to your calendar from anywhere in the world and from any device. Your calendar and all your work should be completely autonomous and not tied to anything.
