Time really is money

 

Time really is money

There are many things you can do to save time and make the maximum use of it. The first step is to establish priorities. When you have a sense of priority, you will find it easy to finish one job and start another immediately.

You cannot prepare a list of priorities in your mind. It has to be committed to writing. When I was a student I used to prepare a list priorities every evening. The list contained 15 things I had to do on the following day. I also gad to review the progress every now and then throughout the day. According to Harold L.Taylor, a Canadian time-management expert, you should give each task a specific time slot. If you follow this procedure regularly, you will reap very good result.

When you prepare priority result list, you will have a problem of deciding which tasks are more important than others are. To solve this problem, time-management experts have suggested a solution. If you are a businessperson, 80 percent of your business will come from 20 percent of your clients. Then it is easy select the most important clients from the 20 percent category. William E.Moore, a man who sold paints in the United States, followed the 80/20 rule to the letter and became a leading businessperson.

If you are doing a job, which requires you to write routine letters to your clients, you have to adopt time saving devices. Instead of writing personally, try to have a set of routine memos, letters and fact sheets in your computer. Some editors in the past had such readymade rejection slips, replies, acknowledgements and requests for donations. 

Today with the mobile phone you can approach your source anytime anywhere. The telephone has become a time saving device. Reporters ring up police stations, hospitals and fire brigade early in the morning to get their stories. However, if you are using a phone, get right to the point without talking about the weather. In fact, the art of mastering time on the telephone is a skill, which has to be taught and learned by every day. If the person you called is busy now, leave a detailed message on his voice mail. This will help you to get a quick answer.

Another lesson in time management is that if you have to do something, do it now. Many people waste time in doing the preliminaries. If you know how to dive in, you will get things done quickly. Remember the old adage. The best time to plant, a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

As children, we have been the futility of procrastination. If you are in the habit of postponing important tasks, you will never get them done. Similarly, never try to be a perfectionist. 

Perfectionist waste just as much time as procrastinators. If you are working to a deadline, you cannot afford to be a perfectionist. Engineers and editors have deadlines to meet. An engineer will not waste time in making a perfect design. Similarly, an editor will not waste time in producing a perfect editorial. They will do a task as best as they could within the deadline.

They watch many interviews on televisions. Some of them go on for hours wasting our time.

In third world countries such as Sri Lanka, even some top politicians have no regard for time. They usually come late to state functions. However leading businessperson knows how to control the agenda by using suitable hints. Once, a journalist over stepped his time limit while interviewing a top businessperson. The businessperson learnt forward in his chair and started stacking his papers together sending out a signal that time was running out.