Time Management Best Practice, time management in technical training centre’s Chapter 2 Review of the Related Literature Page 8

Time Management Best Practice

Time charts are a tool used during the weekly planning process to help organize your time around the major result areas in your life. A time chart is simply a weekly view of your schedule where you allocate time to “activity zones” rather than specific projects.

According to Morgenstern, the key to organizing any space is to give every item a “home,” a place where it logically belongs. To organize a space, you divide it into “activity zones” based on the type of activities that take place, and then assign each item a home in one of the activity zones.

To apply this idea to organizing time, you can divide your schedule into different “activity type zones” and assign each of your activities to one of the zones. For example, you could define a “health/exercise” activity zone where you would assign activities such as exercising at the gym, or going on a hike.

When organizing a space, the activity zones represent the best places to store items associated with activities in that zone. Similarly, the activity zones in a time chart represent the best times for each type of activity in your schedule.

When creating time charts, it is important to pick activity zones that reflect your key result areas, to choose the best times for the different activities, and to allocate time to each zone in a balanced way based on what is most important to you.

These are some sample activity types that you can use when developing your time chart:

·         Health and Fitness

·         Romance

·         Children

·         Family

·         Fun

·         Friends

·         Relaxation

·         Personal Development

·         Spiritual

·         Financial

·         Career

·         Community/Legacy

·         Home

·         Work

·         Planning

You don't have to include all these different areas in your time chart every single week because it may not give you enough time to fit all these different activity types. If that is the case, you can create multiple time charts and vary them from week to week. For example, in one week you may want to focus on relaxation and fun, while another week you focus on your career and finances. By using multiple time charts you not only achieve greater focus and balance over a period of several weeks, but add spice and variety to your life. (Lawson, M. B. 2001).