If you are paid on an hourly basis, you’ll understand that every minute you put in work counts. My employers are very strict about their time schedules and they have a delivery quantity allotted for that period of time. For me, even one minute of paid time is going to affect my total output for the day and so I make it a point to not waste time. Many of us may not be paid on an hourly basis, but on a fixed monthly salary basis, but we are expected to deliver a certain quantity of work at the end of every day. Time management is most important.

Working overtime is not going to please your boss always, as you might expect. It only speaks of your inefficiency. If you are allotted 8 hours a day for your work, try to complete it during that time period. Finishing off a given work well before the given time is not a sign of your efficiency either. You might have compromised with the quality of work at some point. Taking the time ideally allotted for completing a task is seen to be the most efficient way of handling your work.

In a professional ambiance, you might be distracted by so many factors. Your colleagues might ask you to help out with some work or you might be indulging in some personal distractions. Your colleague might ask you out for a 10 minute chat over a cup of coffee in the canteen. If you have an urgent task, you can always cleverly tell that the boss has asked you to complete the task as soon as possible and submit it.

Apart from professional distractions, personal distractions also play a major role. Many times when you find the work on hand tough or boring, you do some other easy-to- accomplish tasks to say that you’ve done work and to save yourself the boredom of difficult work. My friend used to check her professional e-mails a bit more often than required to keep herself away from the main work at hand. Don’t procrastinate tough work. Give it top priority and finish it off first, however impossible or difficult it may be.

Personally, here’s a time management tips that I’ve learnt out of personal experience. As a course ware developer on multimedia technology for school children I had to prepare textual matter as well as slides. Initially when I started the work, I was spending around 15 hours a day in front of my computer, while the work that was given to me on a daily basis was for 8 hours. Now I’m spending exactly 8 hours on the same work! So how could I reduce so many hours? Well, I revamped my entire work pattern. Earlier, since making slides was easier and more interesting than writing huge volumes of text, I’d take up making slides in the first part of the day. By the time I’d start with writing articles, I’m already tired and at that time generating ideas and typing lengthy texts was a boring and tedious affair, which I’d struggle to complete with sufficient breaks in between. I reversed my entire pattern. I first took up writing the textual matter in the morning when I was fresh and observed that I   took remarkably lesser time to complete. The easier and lesser work of making slides hardly took any time in the afternoon.

Time is money and it is the most precious resource  that can never be replenished, use it wisely.