Can a Robot Think Critically and Muse Philosophically? Skills for the Future Workforce
February 12, 2025
Data, Data Everywhere, But No Insights Yet Corporates generate much data on a daily basis that can include everything from data about performance of employees, payroll metrics, production figures, outage times, and just about any conceivable functions such as Sales and Marketing, Admin, HR, and the like. Of particular interest to corporates, and that too […]
With an aim to generate income if not wealth, the social enterprises come up with innovative as well as people-friendly solutions to bring a positive change in the society. What makes them different from the corporate world is their basic aim; they work for the people who live below poverty line and offer flexible working […]
While Pay Disparities are Natural, Biased Pay Systems are not In any organization, it is natural for different employees to be paid differently based on their abilities, seniority, experience, and value that they bring to the organization. Indeed, no organization can afford to pay all employees the same unless it is a Non Profit or […]
Any employee retention strategy would necessarily include a plan for redressing employee grievances and ways and means to address employee issues. This would mean that the employees would be enabled to take their issues regarding pay, their work, their role etc. to the HR manager for each division and expect to get a fair hearing […]
How Small Entrepreneurs face lack of access to capital In recent years, prominent among the revolutions in personal finance and savings has been the rise of microfinance or microcredit as it is also known as. To understand how this works, picture yourself as a small businessperson (you can be a farmer with a marginal landholding, […]
Ideal Work-Life Balance involves an efficient management of professional commitments and responsibilities towards the family as well as society. In a 24/7 schedule of the day, one should ideally work for 8 hours and dedicate 8 hours each to sleep and recreation. But, hardly any of us live in this ideal scenario. Instead the millennial employees spend more than 12 hours at work with little or no time for recreation and minimum possible sleep.
Many of us keep cribbing that we hardly find time for doing those things which we would love to do or hardly have time for taking care of the personal commitments because of the pressures or demands at work. Does it mean that we have very little or no time for such commitments? It talks about nothing but our poor time management skills.
We usually face the dilemma while being encountered with the situation of choosing between urgent and important assignments, because of the issues with prioritization. An efficient time manager would be able to juggle between the urgent and important assignments seamlessly.
Before understanding about the various strategies for effective time management and work-life balance, let’s first understand the time management matrix.
Eisenhower is the key proponent of Time Management matrix, by way of which he has been able to differentiate between urgent and important tasks. As per him, urgent tasks require immediate attention and can set a person into action both physically and mentally. Such assignments may take the forms of urgent e-mails, important phone calls which may demand an immediate attention, pressing assignments involving close deadlines, meetings, huddles, appointments or catching a flight, train or a bus, etc.
On the other hand, important tasks are those which need not be urgent in nature but may have long term implications. Important tasks should be handled by paying utmost attention and taking time for arriving at certain decisions related to strategic or crucial matters.
According to Stephen Covey, we should devote less of our time to tasks which not so important regardless of their urgency, but focus spending a quality time on those tasks which may not be urgent but are high on the importance parameter. Planning out time in this manner will perhaps reduce the perils of poor time management. Let's analyze the four quadrants individually and the strategies which should be followed for ensuring effective time management:
Activities which fall under the Quadrant I category are highly critical and must receive the top priority. Spending a lot of time on activities which come under the quadrant I category, may lead to increase in the stress levels and burnout. By focusing more on activities in the Quadrant II, one can reduce the burden on quadrant I in the long run and avoiding the unimportant or time-wasting activities in Quadrant III and Quadrant IV.
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