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Time management tips for project managers, do you really know them?

Popularity:629 ℃/2024-09-05 18:53:49

preamble

Why Shenzhen University can stand shoulder to shoulder with 985, but has not yet stepped into the "double first-class" ranks?

In China's higher education sector, Shenzhen University, like a dark horse, has risen rapidly, and its comprehensive strength and international influence has been no less than some 985 colleges and universities. However, one wonders why such a powerful university has not yet been recognized as a "double first-class" university?

1. Strength should not be underestimated
Shenzhen University (SZU), a young institution, has developed rapidly since its establishment in 1983. In the soft science university ranking, SZU is ranked 68th, which overwhelms some 985 and 211 universities. Its subject construction, faculty strength, international cooperation and other aspects have significant advantages, and many subject areas enter the ESI world ranking of the top 1%, such achievements, undoubtedly, make people bright.

2. The power of youth
However, SZU's "youth" is also a double-edged sword. Compared with those old and famous universities with a hundred years of history, SZU is a little short of historical precipitation and experience accumulation. In the "double first-class" selection, this may become its shortcoming.

3. Consideration of disciplinary layout
The layout of SZU's disciplines and specialties mainly focuses on science and technology and engineering, while it is relatively weak in other fields such as humanities and social sciences. This "bias" phenomenon may have affected its overall score in the "double first-class" assessment.

4. The reality of competition for resources
As an urban university, SZU may face certain constraints in terms of resource commitment. In competing with larger universities with deeper backgrounds, SZU needs more time and space to accumulate resources.

5. Controversy and distinctiveness go hand in hand
It is worth mentioning that SZU is the only university in China that does not have political science classes or counselors, a feature that has sparked controversy to some extent. This free and democratic atmosphere, although attracting many students and faculty, may also be one of the reasons why it failed to enter the "double first-class".

Shenzhen University, this bright pearl, although in some aspects with the "double first-class" standard is still a gap, but its unique charm and development potential can not be ignored.

If you compare SZU to a project, time management is often seen as a key weapon for success in the battlefield of project management.

Why is it that even when we have a detailed plan, time management on projects often seems ineffective? We put a lot of effort into planning every moment, but the results always fall far short of expectations.

Imagine how much more efficient our projects would be if we could unravel the mystery of ineffective time management?

Let's explore together why time management on projects often fails and how we can turn it around.

I. Why your time management is always ineffective

Many people fill out industry research report templates and want to make others feel that they have great time management skills and are very efficient in their work, completing 10 industries quickly. Does this mean that he has strong time management?

A great deal of work is accomplished in a short period of time, but the quality of the output report is greatly diminished if it lacks in-depth thinking and unique insights.

A large amount of work is done quickly in a short period of time without sufficient thinking and polishing, and such reports often lack depth and insight, making it difficult to bring valuable references to superiors or clients, and may even lead to more serious problems.

This pursuit of speed at the expense of quality is in fact a low level of "efficiency".
(A) Is speed alone time management?

Time management requires us to focus more on the quality and value of our work while ensuring efficiency.

In order to achieve this goal, first of all, we need to schedule enough time for in-depth thinking. It is only after sufficient reflection and in-depth research that we can write a report with depth and insight, thus giving full play to the value of time.

Moreover, our mental state also directly affects our work efficiency. What can be accomplished in an hour when we are in good shape may take three hours to accomplish when we are not.

Even if the same task is completed at different times, the results will vary.

Therefore, we need to know how to rationalize our time and ensure that every minute is given maximum value. Only in this way can we really achieve twice the result with half the effort and create more meaningful and valuable results.

So how do you do that?

First, you need to keep track of your time expenditures to get a clearer picture of your time use patterns and status.
Next, analyze which of your daily tasks will generate more value.
Finally, schedule the right time for different things to maximize the Yeah value of your time. Schedule the highest-value tasks for times when you can get into deep thinking, and schedule repetitive and relatively low-value tasks for other times.

(ii) Is scheduling a full routine time management?

If you had that hour of peace and quiet before bed, how would you choose to spend it?

Is it to immerse yourself in a gripping novel or to reflect on the day's gains and losses in the midst of serene music?
Or do you use the hour to plan tomorrow's schedule and make sure the new day starts well?
If you can't get up on time in the morning to take a new course or complete a set study program, do you blame yourself for it?

If a schedule is arranged very full, there is no buffer of time between each specific matter. If one matter slows down, all the matters scheduled after it will be disrupted, like dominoes, triggering a chain reaction that causes the entire time management program to collapse.

In fact, we all know that time management is not about keeping a full schedule.

Time management is not just about creating a detailed schedule, it's about deciding where your time should be spent in order to achieve your personal and professional goals.

When the weekend rolls around, you're faced with a choice: attend a conference in your industry to expand your network and knowledge, or choose to spend time with your family and enjoy that rare bonding time? It's really a matter of trade-offs that involve your values and life goals.

This first requires us to take a deeper look at our view of time. Understand how you view time and what it means to you. Then, try to find a balance in your daily life to ensure that you are able to be content and fulfilled in every way.

By having a good balance of time perspective and managing it appropriately as needed at all times, you can be more intentional in choosing your path in life rather than being pushed along by life.

(c) Is multi-tasking time management?

The so-called multi-tasking is just an illusion.

If you try to do several things at the same time, you're actually constantly switching tasks rapidly, which consumes a lot of cognitive resources, which in turn leads to less efficiency.

In addition, unfinished tasks take up bandwidth in our brains, which can interfere with our current work.

As a result, multitasking tends to be less efficient for tasks that require deep thinking and solving.

So how should we manage our tasks and time wisely?

II. Have you managed your time account?

A working person, either actively or passively, allocates different time to different accounts. Allocated to a certain account more time, other accounts inside the time is destined to become less, we long-term in which account heavy investment, their own situation will quietly change.

(i) Talk about different time accounts

Necessary time 11 hours: hours spent sleeping + eating + cleaning up after myself + commuting total.
10 hours of work: selling time in exchange for remuneration for labor
3 hours of self time: time available for self-direction

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(ii) Planning your time account

1- Any field, job work can be done modular split, and each module must exist optimization space.
2- Most people follow the experience of those who have gone before them, give a shovel and dig, give an axe and start logging.
3- And the time spent upgrading one's shovel and axe is really very little.

If we go for the things that improve our productivity, we can stand out quickly.

Every young person with no money or background can only afford to choose the life they want if they change their time allocation and give up something. Similarly I have seen too many people who have begun to mix their lives, keep their own mess of business, in the age that should be struggling, put their extra time most of the time into the game, shopping, shopping and eating, drinking and having fun.

This productivity-boosting thing is growth, it's building your core competencies, it's the secret sauce for us ordinary people.

(iii) What is time management

You've heard phrases like "Management by Objectives", "First Things First", "Four Quadrants of Importance", "Rational Scheduling", etc., but it's essentially a multiple choice question that focuses only on results, only on getting things done, and it doesn't answer the question, "What is important? "But it's essentially a multiple choice question that focuses on results and what's more important to accomplish. It doesn't answer the question, "What's important?", and it doesn't give me a way to "save time? It doesn't answer the question "what is important", and I don't get from the course "what helps me save time".

You must have heard of self-management words like "procrastination", "self-control", "energy management", or efficiency words like "how to do something faster and better". If something is done more efficiently, then it takes less time and time is saved.

Being efficient, too, isn't really the province of time management.

So, we're going to look at this with a new perspective. In our view.
Time is resources. Management is action.
Time management is all about helping us squeeze out a precious resource like time through various management actions.

iv) Want more disposable time?

1. Quantify your time
1 - Break down the time period and quantify the amount of time you spend doing each type of thing.
2 - Segment the time attributes to give value meaning to each piece of time.

2. Splitting the necessary time
For example, I've broken down the necessary time into healthy time.
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3. Make a table for each thing
I made a list of those things that I 100% must do every day. Then made a table specifically for each thing.
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Then I can quantify that all kinds of things are specifically consumed.
This table above can be used as a reference to calculate your situation, especially to put your numbers in.

III. Drawing your own time account

(i) Establishment of table headers and specifications for filling them out

1, first of all, to establish a good fill in the table header, and defined, each table header fill in the specification.
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For example, 25 minutes in the morning, commuting + walking for exercise + listening to a book, allowing for parallelism, recorded in 3 compartments. If it's raining that day, then the alternative behavior becomes taking a taxi and swiping WeChat.

For example, for 2 hours at noon, the default mode is to sleep first, then lunch. If you have enough energy, the alternative is to work out at the company gym while brushing up on your drama. The remaining time is used for showering + eating. The time and scene will be adjusted accordingly. At this point, I don't record the shower time and just merge it directly into the gym. The error value is used for this.
2. Categorize and count the time of your behavior
Then based on the situation statistics above, you can design behaviors for yourself, as well as statistics on the expenditures for each behavior, and what time accounts they fall into. The overall time invested can be greater than 24 hours, because it is some time that is reused, and the more time over 24 hours, the more time is reused.
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Provide a few examples of the students' post-record tally. Below are 4 classmates' post-completion tallies.
They used different colors and also customized out some time attributes that can pretty much be used to count the behavior of individuals.

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3. Reviewing and adjusting the timing of your behavior
These students who have completed it really don't know until they count, but they are surprised when they do. When observing each of their own indicators, some outliers, those who have the intention to do so will naturally make changes, that is to say, scrutinize first and then plan. Refer to other people's arrangements and make adjustments to your own life.

1) Optimize wasted time

Tallying and reviewing your time and recognizing problems is the only way to keep fixing, adjusting and optimizing.

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2) Adjusting Healthy Time

For example, if you have 2 commutes per day, this is a period of time when it is perfectly possible to accomplish 2 behaviors at the same time: commuting and exercising.

In this way it is possible to consistently, naturally, passively and unobtrusively invest in a healthy account. The more stable your health is, the fewer accidents you have, the more energy you have, the higher quality of other things you can do, and the more time you have at your disposal than if you don't invest in your health.

(ii) Prioritize your accounts

1. Is your four quadrants of urgency and importance enforceable?

What are the things that you allocate your time, to.

Almost every time management book, and time management course, will go on to popularize the Important Urgency Quadrant with you. You'll understand it in seconds once it's taught.

However, after listening to it, the practice found that it does not have the enforceability, and the result is still just not good time management.

Is your Urgent Important Quadrant executable.

There are simply too many important things for anyone to exhaust.
Important things change often, and the choices are different in different scenarios.
Important things are viewed differently by everyone, with different values.

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2. How you will plan your time now in ten years' time

In terms of life, it starts with a fight for physical strength, followed by a fight for intelligence, and finally returns to a fight for physical strength.

For me, it's always important to maintain a steady time commitment to 2 things: learning input and physical and mental health.

Time is the greatest cost to the learner: (time to capture eyeballs) + (time to read) + (time to comprehend and digest) + (time to memorize attenuate and review) = (time invested)

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IV. How to implement efficiently

(i) Collecting and organizing debris time
We can make a list of fragmented time in advance, which can be divided into 5 minutes, 15 minutes and other time granularity. In order to prevent us from sometimes want to utilize the fragmented time, but do not know what can be done, and then the fragmented time in the thought of passing.

The concept of collecting information in bits and pieces of time and then finding a larger period of time to organize it is actually the concept of "reading later". The benefit is that focusing on a single task improves efficiency and ensures the comprehensiveness and quality of information, thus promoting more efficient information management.

I will be in some fragments of time for the collection as well as the initial screening process, will be some valuable articles or conversations collected into the later reading software, and then find a period of free time dedicated to organizing the work, during which I will also write some reflections, into their own lives, to ensure that the absorption of knowledge.

Often times when performing tasks, you will find that there will be some commonalities between the tasks, and processing these tasks that share similar properties together can reduce the burden on your brain and reduce the amount of time spent switching between different tasks.

(ii) Keeping your time intact

As much as possible, try to keep your time intact by putting everything that needs to be dealt with at the same time.
If it's an important task that requires a 'high level of concentration', focus directly on it, because even just the slightest distraction can interrupt your state of mind-flow and make you need to spend more time regaining your focus.

(iii) How to deal with temporary things

1. Stay away from cell phones
It's a good idea to keep your cell phone away from you while you're getting ready for work, and WeChat can be set to a busy status to indicate that you won't be able to respond to messages in a timely manner. Try to back out of social software on your computer as well, or set it to mute and not pop up messages.

2、Rapidly make a good record of inspiration

Sometimes, we have to respond to something urgent, such as a bug in the online environment, such as some important client negotiation, etc.

We can finish the task at hand to a state where we can pull it up quickly and not have to revisit it the next time we get back into it. It's like if I'm in the middle of writing an article and I interject something urgent, at the very least I'm going to make it to the end of this little paragraph without my thoughts being disrupted.

3. No procrastination

Try to deal with things that can be solved in 5 minutes without procrastination. Cleaning up in a timely manner helps the brain to relax.

(iv) Reward yourself when you complete a task

Setting up rewards can be a great way to keep yourself motivated! This could be a cup of tea or a 5-minute break, or even simply checking a box on your to-do list.

V. Three objectives of the time account

(i) The time account needs to achieve three objectives

Managing time is a means to an end; reaching goals is the ultimate end.

We need to have our long term goals, medium term goals and short term goals.

Think about it, do you want to do what you want to do now, do you want to do it in 3 months? Do you still want to do it three years from now?

Set yourself dream-level goals, ideal-level goals, realistic-level goals, and connect the dots between the three with a niche and todolist.

With them, your life is full of meaning and you can fight the pain that comes with lows and confusion.

(ii) Things to consider in reaching the objectives of the time account

1. Stick to the important things

"Things don't get done!" What is the purpose of writing a to-do list anyway?

It's "focus your time and attention on those tasks that matter. Complete those tasks above the ones that are really useful to you. You can start by taking a moment to think about which tasks are the most important.

2. Delete things that are not related to the goal

Filter your lists well, when to-do lists are too long, we get completely unmotivated. There are tasks that really don't matter to you at all, or sometimes you get a sudden idea and feel like giving it a go, and these task lists are likely to be things that have nothing to do with your goals.

3. Regular review

Reviewing is an important process of time management that can help you better understand how your time is being used and how to use it more effectively.

Effective time management is about balance and flexibility. Different strategies work for different people, and it's important to find what works for you.

(iii) Key points for regular review

1. Record and evaluate time accounts

Review your time records to determine which tasks exceeded time expectations, why, and how to make adjustments in the future.

After a number of replays, you will have a more accurate grasp of your time estimates. This process not only strengthens your perception of time, but also gives you a clear picture of where your time is spent. You can also be more detailed and change the time granularity to half an hour, and after a week, you will be able to find out where your time is going.

2. Setting new goal priorities

Set new time management goals. For example, reducing the time spent on certain activities, setting aside more time for important tasks.
If there are unfinished tasks, determine the priority of the task, and tasks that do not need to be completed for the time being can be put into the archive first.

3. Regular review

Time management is an ongoing process.

Do a small review of less than 10 minutes once a day.
Look at the completion of the list each week and make a plan for the week.
Again, review monthly.

VI. Time management tips for project managers

(i) How to move the project forward

For a program, if your goal is set on making a lot of money at the beginning, you are likely to lose confidence because you will not meet your expectations. Goals can change as the process progresses.

We can divide the whole project into many stages. Adjust your mindset and change your expectations.

Let's say the goal of phase 1 is to run through the project and learn the ropes. The goal of the second phase is to iterate on an important piece of functionality.

Allowing yourself to experience pleasure through constant positive feedback is more conducive to the continuation of the project. Lower your expectations, it's all a surprise.

(ii) How to dismantle large projects

Work or things are too complicated to know how to start, trying to escape the negative emotions that come with being helpless.

For example, if the product dumps over a big requirement, although the product manager will list the requirement points, the task is huge and the task timeframe is one month, it has to be done.

A lot of anxiety caused me to delay starting work, but the Deadline is there and doesn't go away just because you procrastinate.

So what to do, break down specific tasks and set short-term goals.

Let's say it takes two days to build the API documentation for the development; another two days to build the underlying web libraries; and divide the specific tasks based on the number of pages that need to be completed. In this way, I split the big task into many small tasks that only take half a day or a day to complete. The task became specific and easier to realize, and the pressure naturally decreased.

This is a good time to start with a monthly plan and then gradually get more precise with weekly and daily plans.

Seven, the project manager how to know the practice of unity

i) A formula to solve your early wake-up call

One Formula = Positive Motivation to Wake Up Early × Scientific and Painless Methods of Waking Up Early × Necessary Stages of Waking Up Early
- Positive motivation to get up early: the end goal you want to achieve by getting up early, ask why you want to get up early.
- The scientific and painless way to wake up early: double alarm clocks + five minutes of wakefulness.
- Necessary Early Stage: Getting up early is one step at a time, so don't take one giant leap and flash your back.

The Scientific and Painless Way to Wake Up Early
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(ii) Immediate action

Count down three numbers in your mind, 3, 2, 1, and act immediately at the end of the countdown without further hesitation.

Use this method when you are faced with a task or action but feel hesitant or procrastinate. The goal is to create a sense of urgency and an urge to act, breaking the procrastination and prompting the brain to move from thinking to action.

concluding remarks

If you compare Shenzhen University to a project, when do you think it will be successfully accepted as a "double first-class" university?