Time-management Tips...

Some tips for making the best use of your time at the work place. Let me know if you find them useful- I'll be sure to try them out ;)

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. This explains why deadlines make us more effective. For example, if you have all morning to complete a task, it usually takes all morning. But if you allocate two hours to the task, you will probably be able to complete it within that time frame. All tasks should have realistic deadlines. The deadline becomes a goal to work towards. If the deadline is unrealistic, it will put you under needless stress.

Pareto's Principle: The significant items in a given group normally constitute a relatively small portion of the total items in the group. This explains why about 80% of your results are achieved from 20% of the things you do. It's critical to pinpoint those few priority items and complete them at all costs, even if it means leaving the less important tasks undone. This can be more easily accomplished by scheduling the time needed to complete the priority jobs, applying both a start and end time in your planner.

Law of Diminishing Returns: The amount of time required to approach perfection increases exponentially the nearer the job is to completion.
This is why it seldom pays to delay decision-making until you get all the facts or spend an inappropriate amount of time on a task. The extra value received by doing a near perfect job rarely justifies the cost of the additional time spent. Always let the amount of time spent on a task be proportionate to the importance of the task. Don't be a perfectionist.

Law of Comparative Advantage: You should assign, delegate or have someone else do any job that can be done at a wage less than you earn or desire to earn. This is another way of saying that you should not spend $50 per hour labor on $10 per hour jobs. Put a value on your time, whether at work or away from work. Try not to get involved in tasks or activities that yield less return that this value. Delegation, for instance, will free up time to work on tasks that can yield greater returns.

Pleasure Principle: A psychoanalytic concept suggesting that an organism avoids pain and seeks immediate gratification. This explains why we tend to procrastinate on distasteful or overwhelming tasks and work instead on those brief and pleasant tasks, even though they may be less important.

Law of Excluded Alternative: Doing one thing means not doing something else. Since we have a limited amount of time, spending time on one thing means that there is something else that we will be unable to do. It's a life of choices. A corollary to this law is that saying yes to a request is the same as saying no to something else, perhaps something that we would rather do. Have clearly written personal and organizational goals so that you will be able to make wise choices.

Law of Diminishing Importance: The importance of any item varies indirectly with the length of time it lies dormant. The longer an item remains filed, for instance, the less chance it has of ever being retrieved. About 90% of filed paperwork is never retrieved. Important items left on your desk rather than acted upon or filed will gradually lose their importance as time passes. Unfortunately, in many cases the reduced importance results in lost opportunities. To avoid clutter and increase the value of time spent, act on each piece of paper, e-mail, and voice mail message etc. during your scheduled mail time. Do it, file it, delegate it, scrap it or schedule a time to do it later.

Law of Forced Efficiency: There is always enough time to do the most important things. If something is important enough to you, you will always be able to find time to do it. This would indicate that certain things don't get done because of a lack of motivation to do them. This is close to the choice theory, i.e., what gets chosen, gets done. This law denies the validity of the argument that we didn't have time to do something. There is time to do anything; we just can't do everything.