Jun 8, 2021
My time management
It is crazy, right? No time for anything! And it seems that it has increased during this pandemic time!
How do you organize yourself? I have no doubt all of us have good organizational skills, but I would like to do my bit on how I organize my days so that you can maybe take some of my routines with you and, in the same manner, I would like to also know about your practices so that I can embed them with my current approach!
Task oriented vs. defining schedules
My approach (the one that works for me) is task oriented. The term may sound cliche but how does it work when we talk about actual work?
In my case, I define early in the morning the activities that I plan to accomplish on the day (always with a good coffee next to me!). I prefer the task oriented approach rather than setting up schedules because it gives me the penalty/bonus incentive that I need to work more effectively. In this sense, once I have successfully completed my daily tasks, then it is my decision to define on what I want to spend the rest of the day. On the other hand , I don’t leave my desk until I complete my tasks regardless of the time required to finish them!
This may not work for you if you like schedules, but for me it really works fantastic!
Defining tasks: between conventional notebook and MS Outlook Calendar
My tool to define my daily tasks is the Moleskine weekly planner notebook, that combined with the Calendar on MS Outlook for meetings scheduling, it gives my robust system to be ready for all meetings while accomplishing my daily tasks.
This notebook has the feature to have the weekdays on the left page and a free space to write on the right side. In this manner, I list my daily activities on the specific date on the left page and I write other activities to be performed during the week on the right side. For me this works very powerful when it comes to avoid missing tasks, specifically when something comes to my mind that I don’t want to forget, it just gets recorded in the notebook and doesn’t go away until completed!
Once the activities are completed, I highlight them and if they can not be completed or I require of further input, I highligh them also and I shift them to the week after or to any other applicable date.
Time management is essential for the ones that we work from home
I believe being organized and having an optimized time management is very important for everybody but it shall be a must for the ones that we work from home when we are not surrounded by Company office procedures and timings that also help us organizing.
If you happen to be in the second group and you are an engineer, please note that we are working on the engineeringnomads.tech platform where you will be able to promote yourself as an engineer and be found by potential employers who may want to hire your services on an hourly basis through the platform itself!
Just send us an email to hello@engineeringnomads.tech and we will keep you posted.
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