Time Management Skill Samples for Students †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Time Management. Answer: Wearing a watch has for a long time been a conventionally accepted practice among many people. Hanging wall clocks in our houses is also a very typical behavior and practice in many homes. Also, thousands of street clocks have for long been erected in the main streets and cities. The question is, what purpose do all these timekeeping apparatus serve? Time management has been a problem with most people (Koch, 2002) and some have tried to rescue themselves from this issue but to no avail. Indeed, even those with solid timemanagement abilities understand that there is dependably opportunity to get better. Getting to be plainly profitable with your chance is tied in with looking to make consistent and ceaseless enhancements to the way that you play out your work. Gratefully, there are many timemanagement aptitudes which you can enhance to enable you to improve comes about. One of the greatest mix-ups made by the individuals who battle with their time management is feeling that time management abilities are entirely behavioral, e.g., you set an objective, and you take a shot at it. In any case, in all actuality vast numbers of the most critical time administration abilities are psychological, i.e., they are thinking forms. Time management skills have an impact in attaining our life goals and in running smooth businesses and careers. (Spencer, 2001). I have selected to research time management as I think I am related to this topic and I have very often been a victim of poor time management. In this report, I would outline a few concepts on time management skills that I have learned and their implication to effective management practice. Later I would give an account of how knowledge and implementation of these skills have enabled me to improve my management practices. Time management is the act of managing your time effectively to achieve your goals (Edward 1976). Good time management depends on planning and time budgeting. In a day a person has 24 hours. To effectively manage these hours, one has to plan. Planning involves knowing what to do at that time. Planning ensures that all tasks to be done are scheduled for and are allocated enough time. Prioritizing activities is a useful step in planning. Remember good plan is only effective when written down. A planning tool is important in improving productivity. The tool should always be at your reach and should be reviewed daily. Knowing yourself is an important skill in time management. People are different and take different durations to do different tasks. In managing your time, you would probably use for hours to do tasks you find challenging. In the case where you spend more on a particular task, like preparing for work, it is important to wake up a bit early to have enough time to make. It is also good to know what time of the day you are more active. Is it during the morning or night? By doing this, you will be able to schedule important tasks within the times where you are very active and slightly critical or demanding duties in the other hours. Time management is not an independent ability. You can't watch over time however you most likely comprehend that. You can just monitor how you use your opportunity and how you use your chance ought to be determined by favorable objective setting. The most dominant of time management aptitudes is the capability to use your chance in a way which serves your objectives. Core interest. When resolving on choices about what to concentrate your opportunity on, you ought to dependably be cognizant of your objectives and how each activity is gone for conveying you nearer to achieving those goals. Set your priorities. Timekeeping requires a distinction between what is significant and what is urgent (MacKenzie, 1990). Professionals approve that the most vital tasks usually aren't the most urgent ones. However, we have a habit of to letting the urgency dominate our lives. Covey, Merrill, and Merrill (1994) study categorized our activities into four quadrants in their Time Management Matrix: urgent, not urgent, important and not important. If an activity is important and urgent, then prioritize it first. Concentrating on these important activities allows you to gain greater control over your time and possibly reduce the number of critical tasks that do become urgent. Get Organized. Good organization of tasks to be done is effective in management practice. You should devise a system that allows you to only handle a task once and complete it. Many people start one task, then even before finishing, they pick up another one. This often results in poor results of both tasks. Usually, you may have five options for handling information: To get rid of it, Delegate it, act on it yourself, file it temporarily until u find more knowledge to work on it and lastly you may file it permanently where you can easily find it later. Delegate. Delegate refers to assigning out various tasks to each person, authorizing some of your chance for errands that require your skill. Designation starts by identifying the particular errands that others can do and after that identifying the suitable person(s) to do them. You have to choose an individual with the appropriate abilities, knowledge, scheming, and expertise needed to accomplish the task. Be as specific as plausible in illustrating the undertaking and your desires, yet enable the person some chance to modify the errand. Incidentally check to decide how well the person is proceeding and to give any help, being mindful so as not to assume control over the responsibility. At long last, bear in mind to compensate the individual for a vocation well done or make commendations for changes if necessary. (Dodd and Sundheim, 2005). Stop Procrastinating. This is among one of the most important tasks. Refrain from transferring task to another time. Instead, dividing the task into smaller segments that require less time commitment and result in specific, realistic deadlines. In order to motivate you to do certain tasks, you can build a reward system at the end of every small task Managing external time wasters and distractors. Everyone can account for one time when they had seriously planned to do a certain task then all of a sudden from nowhere some friends come to visit you, and since you couldn't ignore them, you were forced to procrastinate the task. Dealing with this problem may be a hard nut to crack but if the possible drop off a few friends who may deter you from effective time management. Besides, let them understand your schedule and know when they can be free to interrupt. Abstain from multitasking. Late mental investigations have demonstrated that multi-entrusting does not really spare time. In 9. Stay away from Multi-entrusting actuality; the inverse is frequently valid. You lose time when changing starting with one assignment than to the next, bringing about lost efficiency (Rubinsteim, Meyer, and Evans, 2001). Routine multi-entrusting may prompt trouble in concentrating and keeping up center when required. Rather, sort out yourself on how you can do one undertaking at any given moment. When you require someone else to do some work for you; you will need to impart in a way which will allow them to play out the work to the coveted standard, in the speediest time. Should any mistakes happen, you will need to bring up the issue quickly and illuminate clearly about the changes that should be effected? In these situations, the nature of your communication candidly affects the quality of the work that completes. Adapting abilities and stress administration. Time administration is not only a behavioral expertise. It is psychological as well. You're considering, and mentality assumes a huge part in deciding your outcomes. Knowing how to adapt to difficulties will enable you to bob back rapidly and diminish the measure of time lost when things turn out badly. Time administration aptitudes and stress management abilities are entwined. They likewise have one noteworthy thing in like manner they enable you to comprehend that it is smarter to keep the issue happening than dealing with it once it occurs. On the off chance that you need to enhance your opportunity administration aptitudes, make proactive anxiety management a custom in your life. Tolerance is both an excellence and an ability in time management. Timekeeping abilities are tied in with guaranteeing that you complete the crucial work. You could attempt to concentrate on accomplishing all the more however you wind up hurrying things and committing errors. When you have amended the missteps (if it is conceivable to do as such), you will have invested more energy than if you'd take as much time as is needed and done the activity legitimately.In my action plan, the main aim was to improve on time management skills through some activities I learned from the concepts noted above. Before I undertook this action plan, I assessed myself using a questionnaire to range my actual position before knowledge on the concepts. From my assessment, I noted some features or behaviors I did which hindered my time management capabilities. In my assessment, I realized that I had life goal but they were not specific, and they were also not time bound. My focus was to attain the goals, but I did not have a clear and well-defined plan on how to achieve my goals. I also did not have a daily to-do list, and this made me have a difficult time in prioritizing activities to do during my studying and working hours. Lack of a to-do list resulted in doing other activities are were not aligned in steps of achieving my set goals. I also noted that I did not delegate most of my duties and this overwhelmed me resulting in a bad performance in school and at work. Since I was in school and also did part-time jobs, I had little time to be with my friends and family. I knew I was a morning person, but I did not utilize this to plan for my activities. Many at times I would struggle to read in the late hours of the night. I would procrastinate tasks including assignments from school, and this would result in poor grades and stressful moments. I did not have a well-defined plan for jobs to do and did not schedule time for interruption. At the end of my tasks, I did not have a rewarding system, and this resulted in reduced motivation to do tasks. Usually, I would start several tasks simultaneously and the end of it all the productivity of all tasks would reduce. My action plan was among many things; to buy a watch, to wake up early and plan for the day, to have a to-do list daily, to priorities activities based on their importance and urgency, to review my plan list daily and often; to avoid procrastinating, to refrain from people who would act as distractors, to finish my assignments in a timely manner and more importantly to develop a positive attitude on time management and to realize the importance of time management. Getting a new watch was very useful in monitoring time when doing activities. Before I would use my phone to check the time but this would later lead me to reply to a text message from my phone and accessing the internet social media platform, and eventually I would find myself having have wasted a lot of time on my phone while the intention was only to check the time. With my watch on my wrist, I no longer miss the bus or reach to work late. I have recently also been able to monitor the duration in which I do specific tasks, and this has helped me in the planning of these tasks. Having a daily to-do list has been of importance in the managing of my time. Every day I have a list of tasks that I should do before the day ends. My tasks are ordered based on the importance and urgency. This to-do list has helped me priorities activities and leave out those that were not purposeful and derailed me away from achieving my goals. Reviewing the "to do list" every day before I sleep has helped me keep track of the tasks I did not finish and possibly try to finish them the next day. Procrastination has still been a struggle for me and even after getting to learn concepts about it, I still find myself transferring tasks to a later date and affects my whole schedule for the next day. However, in my action plan, I am thinking of putting up ways of rewarding myself when I finish tasks way before the deadline. I am hoping this will help me solve the procrastinating problem. In school and my part-time job I get to meet and make friends every day, and some of them are distractors to my schedule. In my action plan, I proposed to avoid them and allocating time for them only when it is urgent and when I have no important pending tasks. However, this also has been a struggle because none of them understands my intentions in improving my time management skills and so would frequently distract me. The delegation of a task has been of help to me and gave me more time to finish up another task. However, to those, I delegate they are often not determined to finish up the work in time, and this has resulted in me having to finish up, or even do entirely a task I had delegated. Also, I have managed to get some free time by paying for services that would use up most of my time. For example, taking clothes to laundry or looking for a person to do household chores for me has saved me a few minutes to complete pending tasks. From my pretest measures, I realized that I am a morning person and I am most active in the morning hours. This has helped me especially in my schoolwork where I would wake up early to read instead of reading up to late in the night. Notably. I have improved my performance in class after I started doing that. Also concerning this, I had prioritized task that needs more concentration and attention and planned them in the morning. I have actualized the rewarding system whereby I often reward myself like buy a cake every time I complete a major task. This has built my motivation and spirit in doing tasks in real time. Social media is indeed a good platform, but I realized from my pretest that I would spend more time in social media until I had no time left to do other tasks. I have avoided this by only accessing social media during the night and not in the day hours. This has improved my productivity in tasks that I do during the day. Understanding the importance of time management and teaching others on the same concepts have also seen me improve my time management skills. Having people to keep you in check every time you deter from you time goals has also helped me a lot. From my action plan outcome it is clear that the principles learned in time management skills is relevant and I have been following them to the later, and the results are good on my side. I would recommend anyone with need in time management to monitor the principles. References: Spencer, B. (2001). College students who wear watches: locus of control and motivational sources.Psychological reports,88(1), 83-84. Koch, C. J., Kleinmann, M. (2002). A stitch in time saves nine: Behavioural decision-making explanations for time management problems.European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,11(2), 199-217. Rubinsteim, J., Meyer, D. Evans, J. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763-797 MacKenzie, A. (1990). The Time Trap (3rd ed.). New York: American Management Association. Trueman, M., Hartley, J. (1996). A comparison between the time-management skills and academic performance of mature and traditional-entry university students.Higher education,32(2), 199-215. Misra, R., McKean, M. (2000). College students' academic stress and its relation to their anxiety, time management, and leisure satisfaction.American Journal of Health Studies,16(1), 41. Britton, B. K., Tesser, A. (1991). Effects of time-management practices on college grades.Journal of educational psychology,83(3), 405. Cemaloglu, N., Filiz, S. (2010). The relation between time management skills and academic achievement of potential teachers.Educational Research Quarterly,33(4), 3.