What Time Management Really Should Be

Questioning and analyzing standard and established time management solutions reveals some relieving insights. Managers, executives and entrepreneurs, forced to use their time most economically surprisingly used quite individual and simple means. The classic time management solutions taught in seminars and presented in countless books only frequently were found.

The more involved in daily hectic, business, schedules and responsibility, the less categorizing, supported prioritizing and other sophisticated procedures of state of the art time management methods had been in use.

The real practice spans from using a book scheduler only, at the same time functioning as a to do list up to users of simple software based local and mobile solutions only.

Nevertheless,  time management is more than attending expensive seminars, returning to the office and after some weeks doing the same as before.

Evidently, the more time is needed to do things, that pay off, the less time is left to serve complex time management systems – that superficially do not produce any return on investment. Maybe there is some degree of shortsightedness hiding the long term benefits of special time management activities.

And it is the activities, the special procedures, that cost time - not the methods. These activities are quickly omitted, if they do not pay off in the very special working situation of a user.

Time management tips are how to do various tasks most efficiently, saving time, doing things faster and so on. However, that doesn’t mean that time is managed well and what is done is effective work. So this cannot really be time management.

One possible and widely accepted time management definition is: managing and clever deciding what to do when for a certain purpose. The distinct decisions which tasks should be done first, the sequence of accomplishing tasks is the core of time management. This is the area that deals with the effective use of time.

Things could be done efficiently, and at the same time this could be penal ineffective. What is more important? Working fast (in the worst case, maybe even into a wrong direction) or reaching the right goals?

Unless you are an assembly-line worker, or working in a profession where you are paid for doing things as fast as possible only, the second fact – higher aims - counts. This should not be a devaluation of such jobs. Even more - being very fast for the above named professions is a goal too.

Another answer for the question what is time management: Differentiate between duties that demand clever decisions from work, that requires not much momentous deciding.

With other words, the focus here is the area of real time management or task organization, and not time management tips that only speed up work.

Time management depends on who needs it and beneficially can use it. And it strongly depends on the kind and structure of the tasks to perform.

However, regardless of the attributes of various target groups for the use of time management, one fact remains: provided the job is clear, it is all about suitable responsible activities. First, activities as tasks that have to be performed. Second, time management activities and skills are prerequisites, that should enable performance.

So the question, what is time management, under these points of view resolve into: it is all about activity – we do something as the root “manage” expresses.

Although it is not important, if what we do is called time management activities or something else, in order to use our time wisely, our single actions should be the most economical.