Skip to main content

Taking Control of Your Time

Like most people I struggle with managing time and ensuring that my day to day activities are being spent on things that add genuine value and are ultimately God honouring. So I am always keen to read books that are helpful in this area. The recent one I read was the Harvard Business School's Taking control of your time . It is a collection of pieces written by various experts on the subject. Here are seven insights that are worth remembering :
1. When launching any important piece of work, visualise the end result. Conceive as much detail as possible the desired outcome of your individual effort, or that of your team.

2. The goal of enlightened time management is to allow you to spend most of your time on work that is truly important, but relative non-urgent.

3. Avoid meetings with more than 12 participants. Nothing will be accomplished. And before calling a meeting, you’ve really got to ask yourself, ‘What is the point?’ Do I really have to have this meeting’?

4. Do your own analysis. It is better to get the facts and do your own analysis. Unless you are really an expert in a field, you don’t know how accurate someone else’ analysis is! As Descartes said, “the work of one is often better oftentimes better that the work of many…”

5. Successful management depends on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. You need to identify the few activities that are most important for you to do and concentrate your efforts on them.

6. It is better to make a decision quickly and be right seven times out of ten than to delay while searching for the perfect solution.

7. True managerial wisdom lies in a kind of forgetfulness- the ability to ignore prior investments, costs and benefits, and to focus instead on the expected marginal investments, costs, and benefits of the particular decision at hand.
All of these are nuggets, thats why I have written them, but one which I found very informative is number 3. I struggle to remember a very effective meeting I have attended that has more than 12 people in it! Those tend to be gatherings rather than meetings. There's never any deep interaction or sharing of ideas - and certainly not everyone is heard! Sadly, many leaders are tempted to think the meeting is a success when many people turn up! I have fallen into the trap many times! 

Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2013
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Empty Page

I am nothing without you I am not ashamed to say But sometimes still I doubt you along my way I am nothing without you An eagle with no wings If I forget about you, I lose everything My heart is an empty stage O let your play begin My life is an empty page for you to colour me with your love It’s such a common feeling to be misunderstood But from you there’s no concealing You know my bad and good So I am not pretending my story never fails But I have already read the ending And your love prevails My heart is an empty stage Let your play begin My life is an empty page for you to colour me with your love The words are from Jonathan Veira’s song Empty Page. One of the tracks off ‘ Rhythms of the Heart’ album. I like his music, and especially this song. Sadly, I couldn’t find the lyrics online, so I had to write them down word for word. I have had this song for many years and it has always spoken me at many lev...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Social limits of markets

Kelvin Albertson has an interesting article  where he argues that neoliberalism focus on self interest (expansion of economic freedoms) inevitably leads to increasing surveillance (reduction in social freedoms). In other words although society may be becoming economically freer it comes at the expense of less social freedoms. It turns out the free market actually imprisons : The need for self-interested but free individuals to be constantly regulating each other to promote social good explains the seeming paradox that, as the state withdraws from the economy in line with neoliberal theory,  its role in criminal justice expands . Where the actions of some have adverse social consequences, the state must attempt to disincentivise them through  regulation  and punishment. And this, of course, requires rigorous detection and monitoring.  
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →