Planning your time.

The key to successful time management is planning your time. This involves organizing your activities in a manner that you want them done, allocating time to them and protecting the planned time, which often involves re-conditioning your environment, and particularly the re-conditioning the expectations of others. Planning your time means planning ahead and taking control of your time. Planning regularly allows you to achieve your goals, monitor your progress and prevent time wastage.

Planning your time involves imposing an activity structure on your working time. It is the activities that determine the scheduling which most times involves allocating time duration to activities. This works at several levels: from the overall structure of a year down to planning how to organize a particular week (or a particular day, or even a particular free hour) in a time-plan. Planning your time will help you to insulate your time from wastage and isolate them to the required task. It also helps you to delegate task properly.

Benefits of planning your time

Sitting down to plan your work, time and activities in detail may seem like a waste of time and resources. The idea here is to take control of the things you have to do: aim to organize your time by making things happen rather have things happen to you. If the only thing that drives you is deadlines, you’ll always find yourself pushed along by the tasks you have to complete, rather than being able to dictate for yourself the order of priorities in your workload.

In contrast, you’ll find it an enormously liberating experience to have the luxury of choosing what to do and when; and all because you’ve planned ahead how to make use of your time, and had the determination to keep to what you have planned.

However, taking the time to organize them makes you more effective and productive, produce better quality works and improve on your confidence.

What is a Time Plan

A time-plan is a plan or an overview of what is happening and when. The time-plan can include spaces for who is responsible for each task.

The details of time-plan depend on the duration of planning (either short term, medium term or long term). A short term personal time- plan may be for a day or a week (to a maximum of a month) will contain a lot of details like date, key events, tasks, duration (in minutes, hours and days), and the person responsible. A medium term plan may be for three months. Therefore it may contain schedules for each month or week and may not contain the persons responsible.  A long term plan may be broken down into quarters or months.

However, using a time-plan is a way to ensure that:

• Targets are met – things happen when they are supposed to,

• Nothing is overlooked or forgotten – no details are missed out,

• All the work is not left until last moment, and

• All the events and task runs smoothly.

How to make a time-plan

It is necessary to understand that making an effective time-plan involves the following:

• Knowing to a meaningful extent all the tasks that are to be performed and the duration for each task

• Creating a TO-DO-LIST or a Task-List of all the tasks in the sequence that they are to be done.

• Allocating priority and time for performing the task. When deadlines are to be met, it is important to have a margin of time in place as insurance against errors or mishaps. For example, if something goes wrong at the last moment, you will have time to respond and to implement your contingency plan.

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Presented below is a list of other articles on time management in this website that might be of interest to you.

1. What is time management?
2. Time management strategies
3. Importance of time management
4. To-do-list

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