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THE CLASSIC TIME WASTERS & THEIR CAUSES

TIME WASTERS -------: CAUSES
Television ----------------: Uncontrolled entertainment
Unscheduled visitors --: Enjoyment of socialising
Phone calls --------------: Escaping real tasks
Crisis Management ----: Lack of planning
Breakdowns -------------: Lack of proper care
Health Breakdown -----: ?????
Haste ---------------------: Impatience with detail
Paper work & reading : Knowledge explosion
Routine & trivia --------: Lack of priorities
Undue socializing -----: Lack of priorities
Non Delegation --------: Fear of incompetence of others
Over Commitment -----: Broad Interests
Meetings ----------------: Poor leadership
Old Fashioned Tools : Resistance to change
of work

TIME MANAGEMENT

Some people do not plan their time because they feel that planning of tasks is wastage of time. They do not understand that by planning the tasks that they have to do , they are making an investment of time, which will double itself, then treble & so on…… In fact Planning takes the pain out of our daily life.

SOME OF THE DETERRENTS TO PLANNING ARE
# Ignorance
# Procrastination
# Sheer Habit
# Consider it as Time Wastage
# Too much overburdened
# Benefits not known
# Sheep Mentality
# Fear of Odd-Man-Out Syndrome
# Individual Resistance
# Consider it as Mechanical Activity

THE TEN MANTRAS FOR PLANNING FOR PERFECTION
# A place for everything
# Everything at its place
# Plan your day
# Write your plans
# Delegate work
# Attend first time to immediate not emergent
# Set goals & review them
# Learn single handling
# Put technology to use
# Use Brainstorming
# Use space

HOW TO SAVE TIME
# Plan your Day
# Plan your Week
# Plan your Month
# Plan your Year
# Learn to say No
# Be punctual
# Screen your phone calls
# Attend to " Urgent " before " Important"
# De-clutter your home & office
# Acquaint yourself with latest Time Management rules
# Don’t waste minutes to save coins
# A place for everything
# Learn single handling
# Manage your health

SWOT Analysis - How to Analyze your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

SWOT Analysis is an effective method of identifying your Strengths and Weaknesses, and to examine the Opportunities and Threats you face. Often carrying out an analysis using the SWOT framework will be enough to reveal changes which can be usefully made.

To carry out a SWOT Analysis write down answers to the following questions:

Strengths:

• What are your advantages?
• What do you do well?

Consider this from your own point of view and from the point of view of the people you deal with. Don't be modest, be realistic. If you are having any difficulty with this, try writing down a list of your characteristics. Some of these will hopefully be strengths!

Weaknesses:

• What could be improved?
• What is done badly?
• What should be avoided?

Again this should be considered from an internal and external basis - do other people perceive weaknesses that you don't see? Do your competitors do any better? It is best to be realistic now, and face any unpleasant truths as soon as possible.

Opportunities:

• Where are the good chances facing you?
• What are the interesting trends?

Useful opportunities can come from such things as:

• Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale
• Changes in government policy related to your field
• Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, etc.
• Local Events

Threats:

• What obstacles do you face?
• What is your competition doing?
• Are the required specifications for your job, products or services changing?
• Is changing technology threatening your position?
• Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?

Carrying out this analysis is will often be illuminating - both in terms of pointing out what needs to be done, and in putting problems into perspective.

Improving Noting Skills with the Help of Mind Maps

Appreciation Technique:
Appreciation is a very simple but powerful technique for extracting the maximum amount of information from a simple fact. Starting with a fact, ask the question 'So what?' - i.e. What are the implications of that fact?

Keep on asking that question until all possible inferences have been drawn.

Appreciation is a technique used by military planners, so we will take a military example:

Fact: It rained heavily last night

• So What?
  The ground will be wet
• So What?
  It will turn into mud quickly
• So What?
  If many troops and vehicles pass over the same ground, movement will be progressively slower and more difficult as the ground gets muddier and more difficult.
• So What?
  Where possible stick to metalled roads or expect movement to be slower than normal.

While it would be possible to reach this conclusion without the use of a formal technique, appreciation provides a framework within which inferences can be extracted quickly and effectively.

Reading Technical Information & Documents

Reading Technical Information:
Technical information is typically less friendly than other information. It is often complex and assumes a high level of initial knowledge.

Manuals are often badly written - a manual is often supplied with a product purely because it is expected. In many cases it will have been given to a junior member of staff to prepare, and will not have been properly edited or reviewed.

Before wading into technical documentation, assess who it has been written for. Is it too basic to meet your needs, or is it so advanced that you cannot understand it? In the latter case it may be more cost effective to bring in an expert to do the job.

If referring to specific information, it is most effective to use the table of contents and index to find the appropriate section.

If you are reading large amounts of the material, it may be effective to photocopy the glossary, and keep this beside you. It will probably also be useful to note down the key concepts in your own words, and refer to them when necessary. Usually the most effective way of making notes is to use Mind Maps. As with other sorts of material it may be most effective to skim the material before reading it in depth.

Reading The 'Whole Subject' Documents:
When you are reading a document, such as a company report, which purports to give an overall analysis of a subject, it is easy to accept the writer's structure of thought, and miss the fact that important information has been omitted or that irrelevant detail has been included.

Where you are reviewing this sort of document, an effective technique is to compile your own table of contents headings before you open the document. You can then use this table of contents to read the document in the order that you want.

Using this technique will allow you to spot where important information is missing or has been obscured, and helps you to avoid trivia. If the writer has a better knowledge of the structure of the topic, this helps you to recognise and adjust your initial view of the best structure.

How to Improve your Reading Skills

Tips for Active Reading
This is an important concept: when you are reading it is often useful to highlight, underline and annotate the text as you go on. This emphasises information in your mind, and helps you to review important points after you have finished studying the text.

Active reading helps to keep your mind focused on the material and stops it wandering.

This is obviously only something to do if you own the document! If you find that active reading helps significantly, then it may be worth photocopying information in more expensive texts. You can then read and mark the photocopies.

Knowing what you want to know:
The most important thing to know is the goal of your study - what do you want to know after reading the text? Once you know this you can examine the text to see whether it is going to move you towards the goal.

An easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. The introduction should let you know who the book is targeted at and what it seeks to achieve, while the chapter headings will show an overall view of the structure of the subject.

While you are looking at the text, ask yourself if it is targeted at you, or assumes too much or too little knowledge. Would other material meet your needs more closely?

Knowing how deeply to study the material:
Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of the subject, you can skim the material. Here you read only chapter headings, introductions and summaries.

If you need a moderate level of information on a subject, then you can scan the text. Here you read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail, and may speed-read the contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and concepts. At this level of looking at the document it is worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.

Only when you need detailed knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text. Here it is best to skim the material first to get an overview of the subject. Once you have done this you can read it in detail while seeing how the information presented relates to the overall structure of the subject.

How to study different sorts of materialDifferent sorts of text hold information in different places, in different ways, with different depths and breadths of coverage. By understanding the layout of the material you are reading, you can extract all useful information much more efficiently.

Reading Magazines and Newspapers:
These tend to give a very fragmented coverage of a subject, typically concentrating on the most interesting and glamorous parts of a topic while ignoring the less interesting but often essential background. Typically areas of useful information are padded out with large areas of irrelevant data or with advertising.

The most effective way of dealing with magazines is to scan their contents tables or indexes, turning directly to interesting articles. If the articles are useful they can be cut out and filed into a folder specifically covering that sort of information. The magazine can then be binned. In this way you begin to build up sets of related articles which may go some way towards explaining the scope of a subject. Information can be retrieved easily and quickly.

Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you read a paper frequently you can learn which sections have useful information, and which ones can be skipped altogether.

By applying an intelligent way of reading newspapers and magazines you can significantly speed the time it takes to extract the information you need from them.

Article Types, and How to Read them:
Articles within newspapers and magazines tend to be in three main types:

News Articles:here the most important information is presented first, with information being less and less significant as the article progresses. News articles are designed to explain the key points first, and then flesh them out with detail.

Opinion Articles:Opinion articles are designed to advance a viewpoint. Here the most important information is contained in the introduction and the summary, with the middle of the article containing supporting arguments.

Feature Articles:These are written to provide entertainment or background on a subject. Typically the most important information is in the body of the text.

If you know what you want from an article, and recognising its type, you can extract information from it quickly and efficiently.