Time management in a digital era

It is said that we live in a digital world. Whoever has a smartphone, understands why. The Internet and the constant technological progress are changing both our private and professional lives.

We now need to be faster and we expect everything around us to be fast. 

Therefore, technological improvements that are helping us to “Save time” are extremely valued. At the same time we need to face new time thieves, especially from the online environment.

What to do?!

Here are some thoughts on how adapt time management to the digital era.

If you don’t plan your day some else will do it for you

This will continue to be true no matter how much the technology will impact our daily lives. If you start the day without having your own plan, you will end up drifting away through random tasks coming from other people. All of them will have the tendency to be important and urgent, which will eventually bring you to frustration and overtime.

So step 1: Start your day by writing down your plan.

Step 2: Stick with your plan. All other new things that are coming during the day you should plan for a time convenient for you.  This way you will manage to control our schedule and time. At the beginning it might be difficult for the others to understand that they need to wait, but after the first situation, they will know what your working style is and adapt to it.

Use the technology in your favor

Choose an online calendar or planner and maintain your daily tasks there. With the help of the multiple functions most online calendars have you can set reminders, postpone activities, make notes, search for past activities and many other things. 

At the end of the day you will not only achieve more and avoid forgetting things, but you will also have the satisfaction of looking at all the things you have completed during the day.

Plan your ‘update’ breaks

Being all the time connected to the internet and having access to so much information can be very tempting.

The innocent and quick checking of the social media accounts is taking much more time than one can imagine. Besides the time actually spent checking the updates of the people in your network on different social media websites, there is also the time you need to get back mentally into the topic we were before. 

Planning the short ‘update breaks’ will help you not only reduce the time you spend doing this but also realize that you haven’t missed anything by not checking 2 hours your accounts.

How good are you in managing time at work? What are your best three things you do to manage time at work effectively?

Just got promoted and don’t know where to start?

Until yesterday you were discussing with your colleagues about the management of the company, now you are one of the management. You used to debate about the bad news or decisions of the company, now you are to one who has to give the bad news.

Being promoted as the manager of your own team is for sure not an easy thing and people who are in such situation face very often hard times.

The first and most important step is to understand the new role and responsibilities. Moving to a management position is nothing else but an extension of your interests as employee to the interests of the company. The scope of the new role in the organization is primarily to make sure that the team members are working towards and achieving the goals of the company. 

Most of the new promoted managers have difficulties in adapting into the new role and they tend to keep the “employee” perspective. They continue doing what they were doing before, concentrate on their individual duties and enjoy the new title. 

The problems appear when they need to take measures that are not seen as positive by their team members, to make and communicate decisions and to take responsibility for the results of their team.

The sooner the new promoted managers understand their role, the more effective they will become as managers and therefore help the team be productive. 

Effects of INCONSISTENT management

Consistency in the workplace helps employees feel secure about their work responsibilities and workplace demands. Consistent management builds trust, respect and credibility and will encourage a rational and reliable behavior. 

Inconsistent managers are a nightmare. 

It is always very hard to work with such people because you never know where they stand and they cannot be trusted. They appear at times to be physically present when their brain has left the building. Sometimes they show empathy sometimes they act as small dictators.

Other than a tremendous annoyance, does leader's inconsistency really cause harm?

YES!

Inconsistent management can damage the morale, self-esteem and productivity of the employees and even impact the overall success of an organization. The potential impact on performance is considerable.   

Let’s take for example inconsistency in commitments.

One of the most demotivating and exhausting aspects within teams at workplace is the wasted time, attention and effort on initiatives or projects that are great and important for a few weeks or a few months and then ignored as leaders move onto the next “hot” idea. If you have committed to a course of action, be consistent and follow-up, seeing it to its end.

Managers who are not consistent in their decision making and behavior will create fear and uncertainty throughout the team.

A manager has always the attention of his team members and he needs to show the same positive and consistent face them.  Of course, we are all humans and not all mornings are nice and shiny. However, self-control is absolutely necessary in order to avoid outbursts of anger, mixed messages, or other destructive and morale-sapping leadership behavior.

How do employees naturally react to inconsistent management?

They don’t trust their manager anymore. They will doubt any advice, guidance or promises and they will act accordingly.

They will start skipping hierarchical levels and go to those managers that are consistent and reliable.

They will approve, but not agree. Most employees are afraid of conflict especially with their managers and therefore, they will never tell their manager directly that they don’t understand a decision or that their manager is acting out of character on a certain occasion. They will simply nod and smile and go back to their office thinking “Here we go again. Another nonsense and useless decision.”

They will have a very slow reaction to the guidelines and requests of the manager. All of their time and energy will be spent talking about or complaining about their manager and about his irregular moods or missteps and work won’t get done.

Consistency makes very often the difference between failure and success. Even the best business plans will fail without a dedication to consistency.  

About self-responsibility at workplace and insanity

Self-responsibility can be defined as the state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something within one's power, control, or management. 

Whether in personal life or at the workplace, when something goes wrong or it doesn't go the way we want, most of us try and find excuses or to find the people guilty for the situation. There will always be someone else or a certain context we can blame and if we can’t find anything rational, then we choose to think that we had bad luck. 

This way we move on and doing the same things we did before because we are convinced the problem was somewhere outside of us or out of our control. We hope that the people around us will do things right next time, we wait for a better context or for the good luck to come. Taking the responsibility for our actions and for our lives is not the most comfortable way, but is for sure the way to change those things in our lives that we are not happy with.

The best thing about realizing that we are responsible for what is going on in our lives is that, this implies the fact that have also the power to do something in order to change the things we don’t like. We don’t need to wait for others to do things better or for a turn of good luck. We can do something right away and it’s up to us to decide what or how we will do it.

In the workplace environment, avoiding responsibility can be easily recognized whenever we hear statements like: “We could have finished the project on time if the Accounting would've given us the right calculations” or “The meeting would have been much more successful if we had a better agenda.” Each of these statements exemplifies what it means to place blame on another member of the team, rather than working to solve the problem as a collective unit. Moreover, individuals tend also to place the blame on others for their under-performance. Affirmations like “I could have reached my objectives if I had a better training” or “I could work more effectively if my colleagues would be more organized” are examples of situations where self-responsibility is avoided. This attitude will only create unnecessary animosity among coworkers and managers and will definitely have a negative impact on the performance and motivation of the employees.

If we are honest to ourselves, we will be able to recognize all the situations in which we are shifting the responsibility for our professional mistakes or failures on external factors. This is the first step in taking personal responsibility. 

The next step is to think about what our role in that specific situation was and what we could have done differently or better. Although every one of us has different tasks to accomplish, there is always something everyone can be doing to have a more positive and progressive impact on the workplace as whole. 

The link towards positive change is to take action in order to avoid future failure or mistakes. If we are not sure exactly what would be the most important or the best thing to do, we should at least try to do something different until we will find out what is that thing that brings us where we want.

         

            Acknowledging our part of “guilt” will make us learn and act differently in the future. Otherwise, we will do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. 
This is what Albert Einstein called Insanity.