The Importance of 86440 By- Naresh Sharma : IMT Programme Manager

86440.. does it ring any bell to you, ok let me give you some hints.. Its one of the most important & scarce thing in

our life, its intangible and it FLIES (though it doesnt have wings). Lastly we always wish to have it MORE.. Got it??

Yes, the 86440 is the number of seconds we have in a day, basically its 1 day of our life. In todays world TIME is

MONEY. So considering it to be a scarce and equated to MONEY, we all need to make the best use of this 86440.

Over the years, Time Management has become a very popular subject and a multi-million dollar industry. People have learned how to prioritize, schedule, and journal, thinking this will help them get more control of their lives. The following article is bits and pieces of very little knowledge that I have gathered during my working & studying days.

In his book 7 habits of highly effective people, Stephen Covey has included a habit called Putting First things first where he explains about 2 x 2 matrix with classification under IMPORTANT & URGENT tags. This is also called as urgency/importance matrix or time management matrix or time leadership matrix.

Quadrant What it means Examples Comments

I - Important and Urgent

The task is Important and has great Urgency to complete. These tasks come adhoc and need our immediate attention.

Customer issue, Crisis Management or what we commonly term as Fire Fighting;

NOT an ideal zone; If we spend too much time in this quadrant, it would mean that we lack proper tools, processes, people or technology to support us. Being in this quadrant for long is not a good choice.

II - Important but NOT Urgent

We need to take real care of this area as if we sit longer time on these item (sometimes due to our procrastinating behavior), they can jump to 1

st Quadrant

and get real urgent. This is

Project Planning, Schedules, Resource planning, Scheduled meetings and etc.

This is an Ideal quadrant and with proper planning, scheduling & delegation of these tasks we may avoid these tasks from becoming Quadrant-1 tasks.

also considered an ideal quadrant as the tasks can be planned and executed.

III- Not Important but Urgent

The tasks in this quadrant are not important but due to its urgency we tend to finish them after we handle the Quadrant-1.

Emails & phone calls, employee interruption chats.

We need to use our best judgment to reduce time spent in this quadrant so it allows us to use that time for quadrant-2.

IV Not Important and Not Urgent

These tasks are usually leisure activity (Note I dont mean to say that Leisure is not IMPORTANT; infact one should take some timeout to think and enjoy but these tasks usually dont pressurize you and have NO impact to your goals.

these tasks do not move you towards your goals

Note: We can classify the tasks as soon as it comes to our todo list into Important and Urgent. Just to add, a task will NOT remain in the same quadrant for ever as our priority changes and hence quadrant it holds changes. Main idea in this model is to work proactively on important things with some good breathing time.

Harvard recently came out with the below diagram that translates the above quadrant into a mind-mapping snapshot. Nevertheless the underlying principles and facts remain same.

Here are some of the tips that I have collected over the years:

1. Use Time to Plan and Schedule: Take time to think, plan and schedule the activities. Not planning activities is a recipe of failure fact, you are planning to fail. Some people thrive using a daily To Do list which they construct either the last thing the previous day or first thing in the morning. you just might find one that works for you,

2. Set achievable Goals : Optimum goals are those which cause us to "stretch" but not "break". Goals gives us direction and planning gives us necessary path to reach to the goals.

3. 80-20 Principle: 80-20 principle/rule was originally mentioned by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto and it means that 80 percent of the reward comes from 20 percent of the effort. 80-20 is very prevalent in whatever we do, be

it Issue resolution, Budgeting, Costing and etc. Basically the trick is to identify those 20 percent, which once addressed, gives us 80 percent result/success.

4. DO THE RIGHT THING RIGHT :Noted management expert, Peter Drucker, says "doing the right thing is more important than doing things right.Focus first on effectiveness (identifying what is the right thing to do), then concentrate on efficiency (doing it right).

5. ART of DELEGATION: Its important that we reduce micro-management wherever possible by delegating the tasks. This helps us to give us more time to concentrate on the activities in Quadrant-2 and thus makes more effective use of our time.

6. USE SOME TIME MANAGEMENT TOOL: Here is the link to find one http://www.dovico.com/tips.aspx

7. REWARD YOURSELF: Treat yourself for small successes and celebrate achievement of goals. Doing so will help

you maintain the necessary balance in life between work and play.

So my friends: What is the truth about time management?

Below are the words that I read somewhere.just reflects what is said above

There is absolutely nothing you can do to change the speed of time. It is not manageable or debatable. Time will

move forward whether you do something or you do nothing. So the term time management is a misnomer.

What we are really talking about is self management and task management. You can manage yourself and your

tasks.