The real technique of time management

There is a core team of us who has been for the past five years making it to three days a week for kickboxing and two days of strength training and some people tend to ask us how we make time to balance office and personal work.

After all, we all need to work for a living and a day cannot stretch beyond 24 hours. In my view, we cannot manage time but we can manage a piece of work to be done in a given time. Hence time management is all about work management.

NCE Export Awards

At last week’s National Chamber of Commerce (NCE) Export Awards presentation, a CEO of a five million rupee company mentioned that he has no time for himself or his family and that he comes home daily very late whilst a another who runs a 50 million turnover business was equally agitated on the late working hours. This means that irrespective of the size of the company, be it 500 million or five billion, all face the same problem.

My mind went back to an international training programme that I attended on time management where it was shared that if a CEO’s work is dependent on the size of the organisation, a person with a five million business would come home at around 7 p.m. whilst a 50 million at 8 p.m., a 500 million at 9 p.m. and the five billion company CEO would never reach home. But this is not true practically. The question is what is the reality?

The reality

The reality of time management is that be it presidents, prime ministers or CEOs, all are held hostage by time. Some have lost control of their sense of time so much so that they have sold their time to sleeping time. If one has sold time, then in effect you have sold yourself is what we were told. Time management in my view is work management and this in turn relates to self management.

How it works

Apparently, self management is determined by our inner constitution with the physical body being only a vehicle carrying our inner personality which is constituted of the mind and the intellect. The mind can reason and judge but it’s our intellect that makes us decide our behaviour.

If one is to illustrate this, a diabetic person may be fond of sweets. His mind wants it but his intellect reasons and rejects it. Such is the power of intellect in modulating our behaviour.

It is said that it is our intellect that governs our self management. No educational institution in the world is designed to develop the intellect. Schools and universities provide mere knowledge, intelligence. An intellect is developed by oneself as opposed to intelligence acquired from teachers and text books. No time management is possible to my mind unless one has developed the intellect.

Time management

Time management is in essence derived from our intellect. The logic being if you want to practice good time management, what is required is accurate backward planning. Backward planning is fixing the goal you wish to achieve in life and programming your efforts backwards. Hence if one wants to be a billionaire, a top CEO or top policymaker, it must be determined in the outset. There after we must work back the time that is required to achieve that end.

This will include assessing one’s capacity to reach the target and one has to stretch a little which means that goal which against calls for a sharp intellect. This will include analysing the contributory factors necessary to achieve the set goal and the resources required.

For instance, for a target to be achieved at say 35 years, one needs to plan the first 20 years, the next 10 years, this year, month, week and today. One must take into consideration all possible and do this planning. If this is done with a clear focus, we were told that we cannot go wrong in time management, which sure made sense and was one of the best lessons we learned on time management.

Conclusion

Hence time management is not looking at what I have to do today, next month or next year. In essence, time management is self management. Self management involves the building of a strong intellect to balance the equation and asking what you want to achieve and then architecturing what needs to be done to achieve that end. The million dollar question is, do we know what we want in life?

 

(The author is a twice winner of the Best Marketer award and then went on to win a Business Excellence award and a Global Leadership award from Diversey-Lever. In 2012 he was awarded the Exemplary Leadership award from the Association of Business/World Education Congress and Chief Marketing Officer Council. Rohantha works for the United Nations – UNOPS.)