Tasks Management, not Time Management

Have you wondered who devised time reckoning and why the clock or your watch was invented? There are several suggestions as to where and who began measuring time. For me, that is moot and academic. What is important is time measurement was meant for us to manage our activities not time itself.

Each of us were given an equal amount of time each day, hence we cannot add nor subtract any therefrom. The 24-hour period given to us, whether managed or unmanaged will slipped us and cannot be recovered. Hence the phrase ‘Time Management’, IMO, is a misnomer. What we can manage, however, are our activities to fit the time we have in a day. If viewed this way, here are three implications in the business setting:

1. Working professionals will become more conscious about managing their work priorities and therefore will accomplish more. An employee time tracking implemented by an employer is meant to place a parameter by which an employee have to render work, and possibly avoid unnecessary overtimes. Hence, an employee’s primary duty is to manage his tasks in order to fit within the work time-frame given.

2. Managers and supervisors will become conscious about their staff performance in any given word day or time-frame. How does it feel when you arrive at the office on time and it is still half-empty? Half of your staffs or colleagues are not yet in. Customers are already waiting in line. Worse, there are those deadlines to meet in so a short time. Frustrating huh. Correct this by closely monitoring your staff’s attendance through an online timesheet.

3. Business owners and CEO will be conscious about managing their business performance through a timely analysis of their business output against specific time frames. Are business targets or sales quota met on time? Deliveries made JIT (just in time)? Are loss manhours monitored? Loss manhours are profit losses, and in the long run, will be translated as business losses. These things can be prevented. Track your business performance against specific time elements or frames by employing business analytics and reporting tools that come with a web time clock provided by Clockspot. Discover trends and anomalies via these tools and see how you business fared against various time factors.

Wherever you are fitted in the above, take a paradigm shift today. Start managing your activities around the time frame you set. Let me hammer this down with the words of David Allen:

“You can't manage time, it just is. So "time management" is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time, and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do.”