How good time management can revolutionise your administration
What is time management and how can it influence your public administration work in a positive way?
Time management refers to various techniques and skills that can help an individual to make use of the available time in the most efficient way and to accomplish goals, tasks and projects within the predetermined period of time. Time management skills vary from, but are not limited to, prioritizing tasks, planning, scheduling, organizing and the delegation of functions. However, it also includes an analysis of the time spend for different activities as well as close monitoring that allows one to improve his time management skills.
How does prioritization help the time management?
Prioritization is essential as it helps an individual to focus mainly on the tasks and duties with the highest priority before he turns to tasks with lower priority that are not related to the main goals or not contributing towards his intended output. Prioritization is an effective time management method as it enables the person to be more productive in stressful times when he is facing work overload as he can cast aside time intensive, but unimportant tasks.
The following are different prioritization techniques that are explained, however you need to choose whatever techniques fits your needs and habits most.
1. Place ABC task Analysis
A – Tasks that are important and urgent
B – Tasks that are important but not urgent
C – Tasks that are not important and not urgent.
Advantages of the ABC analysis
By creating an ABC analysis of your tasks will show you an overview of the importance and urgency of all your tasks.
Disadvantages of the ABC analysis
The ABC analysis is not an in-depth analysis and not that precise as other prioritizing methods. However, if combined with some of the other techniques could show very good results.
2. The 1-10 technique
One of the most popular method for prioritizing tasks, 1 is very important and 10 is unimportant. The advantage of such scaled list is that can be created fast, however it also lacks accuracy.
3. POSEC technique
POSEC stands for Prioritizing by Organizing, Streamlining, Economizing and Contributing, which shall help you, focus on your day-to-day responsibilities. The POSEC method breaks the main goals into smaller sub-goals and subtasks that make it easer to accomplish sub-goal after another until the main goal is accomplished.
POSEC is consists of the following stages:
Prioritize responsibilities accordingly to your goals and the available time
Organize what needs to be achieved regularly to maintain success (financial security)
Streamline tasks you are not fond of, but have to be done (work)
Economize tasks you would like to perform that are not urgent/important (pastime)
Contribute to others. (“Giving something back”, social obligations)
4. Pareto analysis
The rule behind the Pareto analysis is 80/20 rule, where you can accomplish 80% of your tasks and duties with 20% of you available, which means that the remaining 20% will take up to 80% of your remaining time.
How to apply it?
You can apply the Pareto analysis by writing down a to-do list of tasks that is ranked in order of their importance, with the slight difference that importance in regards to the Pareto analysis means the contribution of this task to the overall outcome of your goal/project. In few words: you rank your tasks accordingly to their outcome. If a task does not contribute towards the goal it is regarded as unimportant.
Advantages
The main point in Pareto is that it allows you accomplish the 20% of your tasks that are main contributor to your goal. In this way you accomplish the most important first, while the rest are waiting aside.
Disadvantages
The Pareto Analysis does not consider the urgency and the importance of the tasks, however it can be combined with the “ABC” technique or the “1-10” technique, which might drive the desired outcome.
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