Time Management: Maximizing Productivity, Minimizing
I think of time as one of the fewest things that the poor and the rich have in common, it is the most basic and most important resource. Our success is not anchored on whether our parents or grandparents have generated some generational wealth.
Our success emanates from how we choose to use the time that we have been given. It’s strange because we do
not even know how much time we realy have on the planet, but maybe in that finite amount of time we need to become all tha we can.Who we become is a direct reflection of how we choose to use our time. If by now you still haven’t understood what time is, I will give this definition another go, time is a frame of our existence.
It’s space in the great flow of universal function that you exist in. So today we will talk about the importance of managing our time well. Seeing that you are alive today, you are part of the ecosystem.
That means you are part of some kind of team, whether in a family, friendship, in a relationship, work team, or study group. You make part of a system at any given point in your existence.
Today I want to focus exclusively on time management in a team. I am hoping by the end of this article you will understand the significance of good time management. To the group and the dreadful consequences of the lack of time management.
Understanding Time Management
So if time is, existence, what is time management? Time management is the ability to maximize the use of your life. Dummies version of that, being able to make each day count!
Good time management involves having specific skills and having a certain mindset. You should accept that time is and will never be altered by you and because of that you will do with time what you will.
Definition and Principles of Time Management
In the process of learning how to manage your time well, you must learn how to set specific goals. How to spread out your goals and responsibilities across the time you have. You need to be able prioritize, delegate and plan.
We will start with discussing the importance of setting goals, setting goals involves looking into your life and deciding where you want to take it. Setting goals involves deciding to challenge yourself and take your life to the next level.
It is making a cautious decision to make use of your talents, to better your skills and leave your mark in the world. How should you set the goals? As a team player or team leader you need to have regular meetings with your teammates.
Gather everyone who is involved in the project you are working on. In these meeting, set goals. Goals that look like little steps that help you get to the main goal, which in this case, is completing the project and giving the best possible results.
Have mini deadlines for each member of the team, see to it that each member has tangible action points. Assuming that the team leader is reading this article, always make time for mini deadline conflabs.
This way you will know if the team members are still on schedule if the team members need help and you can come up with ways to help each other and balance out the progress of the project.
Role of Planning and Organizing
First step in the movement of managing time in a big group involves Planning. Planning is the ability to lay out a vision and the steps required to get to it.
Here is advice to the team leader, you are the visionary of the group, you probably receive the project first and you have to hand it down to your peers, (that is in professional environments).
Therefore, you need a moment to envision how this project should go. Take a moment to draw up a strategy of how you will tackle the project ahead of you.
It involves outlining the steps needed to achieve goals, foreseeing potential challenges, and creating strategies to overcome them. Then you set up a meeting with your team, lay out the vision before them, and lay out your strategy to them.
Then either delegate or let your team members volunteer what they would like to do. Write it down, in a map or flowchart, make sure you know who is busy with what.
If you make part of a group at school or church or community, whatever space you are in, your task is simple, pick your struggle. In the tasks outlined, pick the one you think you are best suited to do.
What has time management to do with communication? Well because you are in a team, you need to communicate with your team members like your life depends on it.
You must speak up when you need help, speak up when you have checked off a few things off the list. Reach out to the others, find out if they need help and help whenever you can.
It’s important to communicate so that you can keep yourself in motion, you can make sure you are moving at a pace that is good for the project and the due date. You communicate also to show accountability.
Use other resources!
We live in a day and age where we have a limited number of resources that we could use to enforce effective time management. I will list out a few that you could check out. For professionals this is what you could use:
- Monday.com
- Wrike
- Conf app
- Oracle netsuite
- hubspot
- Ring central
- Freshbooks
- Project central
For college or high school students, try the following apps:
- Trello
- Asana
- Google calendar
- Group me
- Rev
- Proof hub
- Google hangouts
Why you should embrace good Time Management within a Team Setting
More than feeling embarrassed and incompetent every time there is a team meeting, good time management is a blessing to the team because it helps you meet deadlines, in the process avoiding bottlenecks. Good time management also will ensure a smooth workflow within the team.
The link between group time management and individual time management
Each team is as strong as its weakest member, what that means to me is, the downfall or the uprising of your team depends on everyone that comprises it. you need to work on your time management, on an individual level. You need to teach yourself time management, you need to pull your weight.
It’s not advised that you start teaching yourself time management when you are faced with the team project. Make it an ongoing objective of yours, work on your time management until it’s your lifestyle, your second nature, this way you will be a good team player.
Time management mishap
When I was in my third year, we were given an assignment, it was a group assignment. Each group was meant to have 10 participants, so my friends and I did what we always do.
We came together as friends and decided that we were going to tackle the assignment together.There was about a month and a half between the due date and initial date of the assignment.
So, we all agreed that the rest of the curriculum was showing us flames and we were going to wait till the assignment was due in two weeks to work on it.
In the next month we were all fighting to keep afloat because the course was threatening to swallow us. When the assignment due date was 2 weeks closer, no one remembered that we had work to do.
2 weeks passes and guess when we remember that we have an assignment? yes you are right, on the day of submission.
It was submission day and I did not go to campus that day, in fact only three of the guys in our group were on campus. They had a class to attend and so just like me they only saw the Lecturer’s Reminder at 10.
The reminder read like this, “hey guys, of the 7 groups that were registered I have only received 3 group assignments, just wanted to remind you that the assignment is due today at 12pm.
At that point it hit me that, even if I lived a few minutes away from campus, I was never going to make it on time to help my team. I was still in bed.
I had forgotten what the topic was, I literally had nothing of value to offer them. So, I was there virtually, while they were running around trying to carry all 7 of us on their back.
They really tried to save us, but our assignment was submitted with 0 research and out of place pictures.It was terrible, but there was no way of saving it, the assignment product was a big fat disaster.
It didn’t say that we had made it to third on merit. It seriously looked like we had paid our way to third year.I don’t think I need to tell you how the scores came looking, it was as bad as you imagine.
When I saw those results, I knew exactly what had gone wrong. We were not well coordinated, we had not assigned tasks to each other, we had forgotten all about the time, we had very little respect for our work.
You do
not have to remember this story. The consequences were not dire enough. However, it could have been worse and maybe you won’t be so lucky as we were.What i hope you remember though, is the morale of it, you have more to lose if you do not handle your time with care and respect. You may face harsher consequences than we did, we did not get demerits, we were not fired or expelled.
We just had to save the rest of the academic year in our remaining tests and exams.
Conclusion
Working with other people isn’t easy, there are many personalities that we meet and yet still there are many personalities that will clash with ours. However, that does not mean
we can not work with each other for a common goal.There will e dissagreements, they will be hiccups but its not the end , just respect each other’s time and do your part to the best of your ability.
I believe no matter how different we may be as people, we have this one thing in common, time and it is the most important commodity of all life, therefore if we can respect time we can all work together.