From our text, effective time management requires several
things. First, you spend your time on
important matters and not just urgent ones.
Secondly, you are able to clearly distinguish between important vice
urgent tasks. Thirdly, your results that
you obtain are more important than the manner in which you going about time
management. Finally, you must not feel
guilty about saying no when it comes to additional tasks (Whetten &
Cameron, 2011).
Keeping that in mind and looking at
my time management skills, I would say that I have both good and bad
traits. First off, I do a good job of
breaking up my day and planning how my day should go down. From experience, I have learned to never pack
your day without any breaks. While
breaks are important, it is more importantly dead time that allows for some
flex in your schedule. I am also very
punctual in order to stick with my schedule and am pretty good at prioritizing
items in my schedule – I have no problem identifying urgent vice important
tasks.
For some things I do not do well, I
often underestimate the amount of time required to do a project. As a result, I often feel very rushed while
working on them – this would be easily rectified if I would just add a 25%
fudge factor to my time estimates. I
also completely agree with the book when it says that people often fall victim
to feeling like they are getting left behind (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). With respect to prioritizing, while I am good
about scheduling the more important things first, I find myself sometimes
working on lesser important items to break up the monotony of working on the
same thing for hours on end. As a result
of this, I occasionally lose momentum on big projects and fall slightly behind,
resulting in me needing to put forth more effort to bring the project back on
pace. All these things aside, I do have
a major problem with saying no. I have a
very high pain tolerance and can handle lots of things simultaneously, but also
on occasion I have found myself overextended and needing help to reign in some
of my tasks. The end result of my time management skill with respect to time
stress I’d say is neutral – I neither help nor hurt my time management. What I do wish is that the Navy would work
more towards reducing time stressors since it seems like nothing is done at a
normal pace – everything is break neck, “it must get done right now because
this is the most important thing known to man right now”. I’m positive that if the Navy would take a
stance like SAS towards time stressors, they probably would have less turnover
and a lot lower rate of unhappy sailors.
I don’t think my average time
management skills play a part of my locus of control. I am strongly internally centered as I think
that my destiny is in my own hands. While
I know that some things are going to happen outside of my control, I do know
that how I respond to these situations is entirely on me. I can get upset about them and waste time
complaining about it or I can accept it and move forward towards finding a resolution
and getting on with my life.
After studying time management
skills in this exercise, I would say that there are a few areas I can improve
on. First off, knowing that I
chronically underestimate time requirements, I should at the very least add 25%
to the estimate to ensure the project gets done in the allotted time. Secondly, I have got to learn to say no before
I get over tasked instead of waiting until I am in over my head. Thirdly, I need to lose my propensity of
procrastination of things (I don’t procrastinate important things but often
wait until the last minute on small tasks).
In order to accomplish these goals, I plan on thoroughly understanding
and applying several of the rules listed on pages 125 through 128 of the book –
there are a ton of good thoughts in there that I plan on using over the coming
weeks to gauge how I react to using them.
To do this (gauge how they work), I’m lucky enough to have a backlog of
old daily schedules where I have the original plan and the revised plan at the
end of the day that reflects how the day actually played out. By keeping track of my time management, I can
compare how efficiently I have used my time applying the rules from the book to
how I faired without them several weeks ago.
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