Time management
Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. It involves the balancing of various demands upon a person relating to work, social life, family, hobbies, personal interests, and commitments with the finite nature of time. Using time effectively gives the person "choice" on spending or managing activities at their own time and expediency. Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects, and goals complying with a due date . Initially, time management referred to just business or work activities, but eventually, the term broadened to include personal activities as well. A time management system is a designed combination of processes, tools, techniques, and methods. Time management is usually a necessity in any project management as it determines the project completion time and scope. The major themes arising from the literature on time management include the following: Cultural views of time management. Differences in the way a culture views time can affect the way their time is managed. For example, a "linear time" view is a way of conceiving time  as flowing from one moment to the next in a linear fashion. This linear perception of time is predominant in America along with most Northern European countries, such as Germany, Switzerland, and England. People in these cultures tend to place a large value on productive time management, and tend to avoid decisions or actions that would result in wasted time. This linear view of time correlates to these cultures being more “monochronic”, or preferring to do only one thing at a time. Generally speaking, this cultural view leads to a better focus on accomplishing a singular task and hence, more  productive time management. Another cultural time view is "multi-active time" view. In multi-active cultures, most people feel that the more activities or tasks being done at once the better. This creates a sense of happiness. Multi-active cultures are “polychronic” or prefer to do multiple tasks at once. This multi-active time view is prominent in most Southern European countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In these cultures, the people often tend to spend time on things they deem to be more important such as placing a high importance on finishing social conversations. In business environments, they  often pay little attention to how long meetings last, rather the focus is on having high quality meetings. In general, the cultural focus tends to be on synergy and creativity over efficiency. A final cultural time view is a "cyclical time" view. In cyclical cultures, time is considered neither linear nor event related. Because days, months, years, seasons, and events happen in regular repetitive occurrences, time is viewed as cyclical. In this view, time is not seen as wasted because it will always come back later, hence there is an unlimited amount of it. This cyclical time view is prevalent  throughout most countries in Asia, including Japan and China. It is more important in cultures with cyclical concepts of time to complete tasks correctly, therefore most people will spend more time thinking about decisions and the impact they will have, before acting on their plans. Most people in cyclical cultures tend to understand that other cultures have different perspectives of time and are cognizant of this when acting on a global stage. Creating an effective environment. Some time-management literature stresses tasks related to the creation of an environment conducive to "real" effectiveness. These strategies include principles such as: Also , the timing of tackling tasks is important. As tasks requiring high levels of concentration and mental energy are often done at the beginning of the day when a person is more refreshed. Literature also focuses on overcoming chronic psychological issues such as procrastination. Excessive and chronic inability to manage time effectively may result from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or attention deficit disorder (ADD). Diagnostic criteria include a sense of underachievement, difficulty getting organized, trouble getting started, trouble managing many simultaneous projects, and trouble with follow-through. Daniel Amen focuses on the prefrontal cortex which is the most recently evolved  part of the brain. It manages the functions of attention span, impulse management, organization, learning from experience, and self-monitoring, among others. Some authors argue that changing the way the prefrontal cortex works is possible and offer a solution. Setting priorities and goals. Time management strategies are often associated with the recommendation to set personal goals. The literature stresses themes such as: These goals are recorded and may be broken down into a project, an action plan, or a simple task list. For individual tasks or for goals, an importance rating may be established, deadlines may be set, and priorities  assigned. This process results in a plan with a task list, schedule, or calendar of activities. Authors may recommend a daily, weekly, monthly, or other planning periods, associated with different scope of planning or review. This is done in various ways, as follows: ABCD analysis. A technique that has been used in business management for a long time is the categorization of large data into groups. These groups are often marked A, B, C and D—hence the name. Activities are ranked by these general criteria: Each group is then rank-ordered by priority - to further refine the prioritization, some  individuals choose to then force-rank all "B" items as either "A" or "C". ABC analysis can incorporate more than three groups. ABC analysis is frequently combined with Pareto analysis. Pareto analysis. The Pareto principle is the idea that 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. Applied to productivity, it means that 80% of results can be achieved by doing 20% of tasks. If productivity is the aim of time management, then these tasks should be prioritized higher. The Eisenhower Method. The "Eisenhower Method" or "Eisenhower Principle" is a method that utilizes the principles of importance and urgency to  organize priorities and workload. This method stems from a quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Eisenhower did not claim this insight for his own, but attributed it to an (unnamed) "former college president." Using the Eisenhower Decision Principle, tasks are evaluated using the criteria important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent, and then placed in according quadrants in an Eisenhower Matrix (also known as an "Eisenhower Box" or "Eisenhower Decision Matrix"). Tasks in the quadrants are then handled as  follows. POSEC method. POSEC is an acronym for "Prioritize by Organizing, Streamlining, Economizing and Contributing". The method dictates a template which emphasizes an average individual's immediate sense of emotional and monetary security. It suggests that by attending to one's personal responsibilities first, an individual is better positioned to shoulder collective responsibilities. Inherent in the acronym is a hierarchy of self-realization, which mirrors Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Elimination of non-priorities. Time management also covers how to eliminate tasks that do not provide value to the individual or organization. According to the "Wall Street Journal" contributor  Jared Sandberg, task lists "aren't the key to productivity [that] they're cracked up to be". He reports an estimated "30% of listers spend more time managing their lists than [they do] completing what's on them". The software executive Elisabeth Hendrickson asserts that rigid adherence to task lists can create a "tyranny of the to-do list" that forces one to "waste time on unimportant activities". Any form of stress is considered to be debilitative for learning and life; even if adaptability could be acquired, its effects are damaging. But stress is an unavoidable part of daily life , and Reinhold Niebuhr suggests it's better to face it, as if having "the serenity to accept the things one cannot change and having the courage to change the things one can." Part of setting priorities and goals is the emotion "worry," and its function is to ignore the present to fixate on a future that never arrives, which leads to the fruitless expense of one's time and energy. It is an unnecessary cost or a false aspect that can interfere with plans due to human factors. The Eisenhower Method is a strategy used to compete with worry  and dull-imperative tasks. Worry as stress is a reaction to a set of environmental factors; understanding this is not a part of the person gives the person possibilities to manage them. Athletes under a coach call this management as "putting on the game face." Change is hard, and daily life patterns are the most deeply ingrained habits of all. To eliminate non-priorities in study time, it is suggested to divide the tasks, capture the moments, review task handling method, postpone unimportant tasks (understanding that a task's current relevancy and sense of urgency reflect the wants of the  person rather than the task's importance), manage life balance (rest, sleep, leisure), and cheat leisure and nonproductive time (hearing audio taping of lectures, going through presentations of lectures when in a queue, etc.). Certain unnecessary factors that affect time management are habits, lack of task definition (lack of clarity), over-protectiveness of the work, the guilt of not meeting objectives and subsequent avoidance of present tasks, defining tasks with higher expectations than their worth (over-qualifying), focusing on matters that have an apparent positive outlook without assessing their importance to personal needs, tasks that require support and time, sectional  interests, and conflicts, etc. A habituated systematic process becomes a device that the person can use with ownership for effective time management. Implementation of goals. A task list (also called a to-do list or "things-to-do") is a list of tasks to be completed, such as chores or steps toward completing a project. It is an inventory tool which serves as an alternative or supplement to memory. Task lists are used in self-management, business management, project management, and software development. It may involve more than one list. When one of the items on a task list is  accomplished, the task is checked or crossed off. The traditional method is to write these on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil, usually on a note pad or clip-board. Task lists can also have the form of paper or software checklists. Writer Julie Morgenstern suggests "do's and don'ts" of time management that include: Numerous digital equivalents are now available, including personal information management (PIM) applications and most PDAs. There are also several web-based task list applications, many of which are free. Task list organization. Task lists are often diarized and tiered. The simplest tiered  system includes a general to-do list (or task-holding file) to record all the tasks the person needs to accomplish and a daily to-do list which is created each day by transferring tasks from the general to-do list. An alternative is to create a "not-to-do list", to avoid unnecessary tasks. Task lists are often prioritized in the following ways. A completely different approach which argues "against" prioritizing altogether was put forward by British author Mark Forster in his book "Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management". This is based on the idea of  operating "closed" to-do lists, instead of the traditional "open" to-do list. He argues that the traditional never-ending to-do lists virtually guarantees that some of your work will be left undone. This approach advocates getting all your work done, every day, and if you are unable to achieve it, that helps you diagnose where you are going wrong and what needs to change. Various writers have stressed potential difficulties with to-do lists such as the following. Software applications. Many companies use time tracking software to track an employee's working time, billable hours, etc., e.g. law  practice management software. Many software products for time management support multiple users. They allow the person to give tasks to other users and use the software for communication and to prioritize tasks. Task-list applications may be thought of as lightweight personal information manager or project management software. Modern task list applications may have built-in task hierarchy (tasks are composed of subtasks which again may contain subtasks), may support multiple methods of filtering and ordering the list of tasks, and may allow one to associate arbitrarily long notes for each task. In contrast to the concept of allowing the  person to use multiple filtering methods, at least one software product additionally contains a mode where the software will attempt to dynamically determine the best tasks for any given moment. Time management systems. Time management systems often include a time clock or web-based application used to track an employee's work hours. Time management systems give employers insights into their workforce, allowing them to see, plan and manage employees' time. Doing so allows employers to manage labor costs and increase productivity. A time management system automates processes, which eliminates paperwork and tedious tasks. GTD (Getting Things Done). Getting Things  Done was created by David Allen. The basic idea behind this method is to finish all the small tasks immediately and a big task is to be divided into smaller tasks to start completing now. The reasoning behind this is to avoid the information overload or "brain freeze" which is likely to occur when there are hundreds of tasks. The thrust of GTD is to encourage the user to get their tasks and ideas out and on paper and organized as quickly as possible so they're easy to manage and see. Pomodoro. Francesco Cirillo's "Pomodoro Technique" was originally  conceived in the late 1980s and gradually refined until it was later defined in 1992. The technique is the namesake of a Pomodoro (Italian for tomato) shaped kitchen timer initially used by Cirillo during his time at university. The "Pomodoro" is described as the fundamental metric of time within the technique and is traditionally defined as being 30 minutes long, consisting of 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of break time. Cirillo also recommends a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes after every four Pomodoros. Through experimentation involving various workgroups and mentoring activities, Cirillo determined the "ideal Pomodoro