Not too long ago, life in Myanmar seemed to move slowly with plenty of hours for praying at the pagodas, hanging out with family, playing games, and helping friends. However, the modernization of Myanmar has brought with it the ‘rat race’ that Westerners have often complained about: the rushed feeling that time is slipping away and the need to ‘keep up’ with the neighbors’ material wealth by working longer hours. This feeling coupled with the fact that more opportunity often means more crowds and more traffic, has left many Myanmar people tired as they struggle to manage their time appropriately.
Time management is simply a process that involves planning and organizing specific activities within a restricted time frame. Numerous daily tasks often pull us in multiple directions and if we aren’t careful this can lead to stress. However, with good time management skills you can learn how to be productive and stress-free.
Managing Time at the Work Place
The work place is easily the most action packed environment where the race against time is never ending. While a lot of the stress can be attributed to competition and the sheer volume of work, there is a part which can be self-inflicted. In a survey conducted in 200 countries on 38000 people, most of them admitted to using only 60 percent of their available work time, and though they went to work five days a week, their productivity was limited to three days a week only. Even office distractions take away 2.1 hours every day.
What can help is:
- Maintaining a clutter free environment – clutter merely adds to chaos and makes it difficult to find the required documents and having to rummage through piles time and again. This is just more time wasted.
- Prioritizing and understanding the difference between urgent and important- tasks need to be classified and urgent ones attended to, first.
- Polishing one’s organizing skills- the organised worker manages to save time and effort while also being more productive
- Making the right choices- while multitasking is recommended, one has to choose between tasks athand-to complete the quicker ones first and then having more time to address the time-consuming ones.
- Minimizing distractions and avoiding interruptions during busy timesco-workers stopping by, open chat screens etc make continuous work difficult and statistics reveal, that 45% of the work cannot be resumed immediately.
- Keeping meetings focussed, with little room for unproductive, inconclusive discussions – data collected from various offices shows that 45% of senior managers feel that productivity increases significantly if meeting are banned for even one day a week.
- Delegating work to use the core competencies of others in the team
- Addiction to sit on desk and ‘being busy’ must be replaced by refreshing breaks to enhance productive output. A time-diary study showed that workers claiming to work 68-70 hours a week, actually work for a little over 52 hours
- Maintain a healthy balance, with time for everything
Such tips will help in gaining productive hours that reveal greater efficiency and productivity that helps to meet work overloads.
Time Management in Your Personal Life
In every aspect of life, we need to prioritise and analyse the costs and benefits of every action, making changes where the costs outweigh the benefits. Wasteful activities like constant checking for updates on social media, emails and posts that are of no significance, can easily be replaced by mindful activities, games and sports, which combine to promote physical and mental well being.
This certainly does not mean that day to day living becomes a no-nonsense mundane affair. It only means setting limits to both productive and non-productive activities and keeping a healthy balance.
One of the most commonly heard refrains is, “I am so busy” and “I have no time”, which makes life appear to be a marathon race against time. Contrary to expectations, such people are not admired but are more likely considered to be bad time managers. A close look at cultures and societies across the globe, reveals how time is managed and used. In countries like the U.S., time is like a pressure cooker ready to burst, with so much to do, with very little time. This is considered completely normal and a sign of importance, success and intelligence, but in some countries rushing is a sign of rudeness and supposed to indicate a poverty of spirit.
As nations like Myanmar grow and develop, a bit of consideration must be given to the quality of life of the people and not giving up on activities that have filled days before, and learning to rush like the rest of the world.