I am Back after a Short Gap – Time Management and its Importance!

It’s been quite some time that I wrote a post here at bpodiary. Blame it on the amount of work that I had taken upon myself, personal life and the urge to spend that extra time with my daughter or, on the sheer laziness and procrastination, it was a loss to me in many ways and I am sure in some ways to you as the reader.

Just as I finished the above paragraph, I for a few minutes felt like the other corporate mortals who blame inaction, on all or, some of the above. But the fact of the matter is that it is a serious lack of time management that leads to such situations.

Okay..so before we move onto a serious discussion on Time Management, a few things on what was going on in the past few months and a little about some of my gains and losses.

As a blogger, I lost a lot of things for BPODiary. This blog had a pagerank of 3 (read this article on pagerank if you are new to it) till about 7 months back and it has dropped 2 points and is at a PR of 1 today – Massive loss. You will realize this if you are active on the internet and in blogging.

I used to receive about 3-4 guest post requests from bloggers who were interested in contributing content to the wonderful blog. A lot of these were not replied to in time. Guest bloggers dropped off and stopped writing in to me. The result was a loss of valuable and interesting content that you all would have enjoyed otherwise.

This blog was paying me. I was getting about $260.00 in revenue from advertisements from the blog which dropped to almost a ZERO in the last 5 months. A Considerable loss in income.

Time Management and The Need for it

The discussion in the above 3 paragraphs would have given you a fair idea of what a bit of time management could have done for me and this blog. The loss was huge both in monetary terms and other intangible benefits.

This is precisely what time management can do for you. Prioritizing critical activities and managing them within schedules will help you achieve a lot more in both your professional as well as personal lives. At the same time it will also help you build credibility because you will be seen as the guy who has the ability to do more in less time.

If you wish to have that edge over your colleague, then one of the important attributes you should have. Workplace is extremely competitive these days and it is this edge that will help you when it comes to career progression and better relationship.

Time Management – The How

A detailed discussion on how to go about an effective time management plan can be a different post. But in here, let me put a few simple steps to an effective time management.

A few things that you need to bear in mind are as follows –

• Take a sheet of paper and write down you activities. Then rank them in order of priority. Once you have put the priority against each of the activities, re-arrange them in the order of priorities.
• Mark each activity that can be delegated to somebody else.
• Mark activities that can be combined into one or, can be considered as an extension of one of the other activity.
• Rewrite the activities after removing the ones that you will be delegating to others and after combining activities that can be combined.
• Put a realistic expected completion time against each of the activity. Don’t forget to write down the date and time.

So that is all that is involved in a basic time management plan.

Hope you gained some insight into time management, in this post. I will cover this topic in detail in a later post. Don’t forget to let me know you questions and feedback by commenting below.