ARDEN R. BORROMEO
Master in Public Administration – Open University
Module 5 – Time Management
Time management is an ability of an individual to become efficient and gives
direction in achieving goals on time by planning and organizing the daily activities. Every
individual should practice time management, especially when you are a student or a
working adult, to know your priorites in life without pressuring yourself of what to do.
Having good time management will increase academic or work performance, leading to
a quality output and maintaining a work-life balance. Thus, there are still obstacles,
interruptions, disturbances, and barriers that an individual may experience in achieving
their daily goals, resulting in stress and time pressure.
Every company or organization has their own preferred time or schedules in work
depending on the products and services they provide to their customer. Ther are four
alternative work schedules that can be applied namely: (1) common window schedule,
can work as early as 6:00am and as late as 8:00pm every Tuesday to Thursday and must
be present at the middle of 10:00am to 2:00pm, (2) four-day work week, employee must
report from Tuesday to Thursday and may choose a day off Monday or Friday and
surprisingly this experiment resulted to a constant work performance and increased the
work-life balanced of an employee by 24%, (3) compressed workdays, a five-hour
workday from 8:00am to 1:00pm that eliminates unproductive afternoons, and (4) do-ityourself PTO, the employee has to decide when to take off in a longer time if they want.
Presenting these work schedules, as a working individual, we are adapting the four-day
workweek due to pandemic wherein at this days we focused more on meeting the
deadlines and daily accomplishment in work. We can enjoy three days vacation doing
extracurricular activities, family bonding, and other personal matter. In the study of
Whillans et al. (2021), the four-day work week schedules resulted in low stress
management and improved an individual's quality of life without compromising the work
performance. Considering the psyche of every Filipino, the best work schedule depends
on the nature of work. For example, in the Philippines we have around 1.3 million call
center agents that adapts different shift based from their assignment, a health workers
such as doctors, nurse, and midwife also have work shifting, a working student need to
divide the time in studying and working considering the vacant time in school, and most
of the filipino were engaged in a work schedule of 8 hours a day for 5 days. It is not about
having a best work schedule, it is about having an effective time management and
handling every situations in a way that your work and time will not be sacrificed. In time
management, an individual will also improve their decision-making, practice organization,
and create a better scheduling.
One of the best important thing to achieve an effective time management is having
a SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and
timely. In setting the goals, we should characterize what we really want to achieve and
set objectives. Instead of saying “increased sale”, we must be specific by saying
“increased the sale of acquired asset by 5%”. A measurable goals will assess how far the
goal is, it can be quantitative or qualitative. An objectives must be relevant to what is
needed by an organization and in lined with the mission-vision. Lastly, our goals must be
time-bound. It is impportant to set a target date to review if the goals are succesfully
achieve on time. (clearreview.com)
Time management is very important especially that we are always involve in
different daily activities. Using time management effectively will give us a chance to do
other things but problems and other obstacles will destroy our plans. That is why it is
important to review your long and short term goals to realigned your current situations,
strictly follow the schedules to avoid disorientation of time and be able to know the
priorities, be efficient and effective everyday to eliminate delays in all activities, and
always evaluate yourselves if you are on the right path in achieving goals and objectives.
Reference:
Whillans, A. et al. (2021). A Guide to Implementing the 4-Day Workweek.
Clearreview.com. Retrieved from https://www.clearreview.com/resources/guides/whichsmart-objectives-definition-should-i-use/