Table Of Contents 1. How to manage time? - Introduction 2. The 80/20 rule! 3. Do what you need to do! 1. How to manage time? Everybody has the same amount of time. Yet some people get more done in the same amount of time and some people don t get anything done. The truth is, that most of the people who don t get anything done are probably laz y people who just relax for most of their day. Or they, are probably people who pro crastinate a lot. These are personal problems . This article will NOT help you to so lve these problems. This article is written for those people, who work and work and work and work an d still do not seem to get any work done. I know this sounds funny! But this is a problem that many people have. They devote their complete day to working but a t the end of the day, they are not any closer to their aim. If you are one of th ese people, this article is for you. If you are just 2. The 80/20 rule of time management! As we have already mentioned, everyone has the same amount of time. Yet some peo ple, manage to achieve better results in a shorter period of time. Others take a much longer to achieve the same results. Why? The complete understanding of time management is understood if you just understa nd what I am about to say next! Since you have a finite or limited amount of time, each day, use your time each day to do the right things. Don t waste your time doing the useless or wrong things. If yo u just do this, you will be able to achieve results at a much faster rate! Obviously, the next question you will ask is, what do I mean by hat do I mean by wrong or useless things? right things and w lazy , then this article will not do any miracle for you.One obvious answer that probably comes to your mind is that, watching TV for 3 ho urs or surfing the net and reading forwarded e-mail is an obviously useless or wro ng activity to waste limited time on. To some extent you are right. Though it is not a good idea to spend the whole da y doing these things, you must relax from time to time or your ability to work w ill reduce. Also the quality of the work you are doing will reduce. However, this is NOT what we really mean by wrong or useless work! work, you need to understand the 80/To understand what we mean by wrong or useless20 rule . If you are doing an MBA or have studied economics, you probably have alr eady come across this rule in some form or the other. The 80/20 rule has many different forms. However, the form that maters to us is that: Only 20% of all the effort you make, causes 80% of your final results! Please Note: The above rule is only true if you do not manage your time properly . If you do manage your time properly, then this law does not hold true for you. The law represents the "average public". This rule tells us that we can do many many things to get the results we want, b ut only 20% of the things we do, actually produce 80% of our final results. The other 80% of the things we do just produces the remaining 20% of the results. This law is almost everywhere, in business, in your personal life, in your work etc. For example: * 80% of the world s money is in the hands of 20% of the people * 80% of total business sales come from 20% of your clients * 80% of the India s problems are caused by 20% of the total causes. Let us try to understand this rule by taking the example of a student who wants to learn how to solve the sums in a particular chapter. Let us assume that the s tudent has devoted 4 hours for this. Now, the student can do many things to achieve the result he wants. He could learn up all the sums in the chapter. This would probably take him more t han the 4 hours he has decided to give to the task. He might decide to learn up all the formulas and then practice all the sums. This might take him the complete period of the four hours. He might decide to read and completely understand the fundamental concept behind the formulas, the derivation of the formulas and how they are applied. Then he might try to apply the formulas to a few sums until he is satisfied and that s it! This might take around 2 hours. This is how you must use the 80/20 rule. The above example is crude, but you do get the basic picture. When you want to achieve a particular result, there are m any things you can do. But there are certain things, (the 20%) if you do them, 8 0% of the result you want to achieve will take care of itself! If the above example did not clear your doubts, consider this: Assume, that you have to convince a group 20 people to do something for you. You can achieve this result in different ways. You could go and approach each and every person of the 20 people and convince al l of them seperately. This will probably take up a huge amount of time. Another way in which you can achieve this result would be: * Identify the leaders or the influential people in the group. Identify the people in the group who the other people follow. This will be a small number, tw o or three. * Approach these people and convince them. * Once these people are convinced, they will convince the other people. This is another crude example. But, what needs to be understood is that, by justdoing 20% of the work, you can get the result you intend. The remaining 80% of the work that you have to, is done on its own. This way, you save time and you c oncentrate on what really matters. This way, you do the right things and the selves. This is the key of time management. wrong or useless things take care of themNext time there is a particular task you want to complete, don t just jump head on into the task. Stop. Plan. Think about the task. Locate the 20% part of the tas k. Most tasks have a 20%. Once you identify it, then work it. This will give you 80% of your results. This way you will end up saving on a whole lot of time. There is much more to learn about the 80/20 theory. To really appreciate the pow er of the principle, we suggest you read the book "80/20 Management". You can ge t your self the book from ebay.in. If you are new to ebay, do not worry, you can just sign up from here free and bu y whatever you are interested in right now! It's quite easy! Once you are signed up, search for "80/20 Management". You could then choose one of the results and buy the book! We recommend that you buy the book from Ebay.in since it is quite safe & secure and you will get a good deal. If you are not comfortable with Credit Card paymen ts, there are always other options like DD, money order etc. that you can go in for. 3. Do what you need to do! You can do work very efficiently if you use the 80/20 rule explained in the last section. You will be able to save a whole lot of time if you identify the 20% t hat controls the 80%. However, to save even more time, just don t work at all! I know this is a little shocking. But many of the things that we do are simply t worth doing . What do we mean by not worth doing? To understand that, you need to find out: What YOU want? Or : What result you want to achieve? If you are a student, you probably want to achieve a result like: I want 85% in my coming exams! Or you may have a smaller result like I want to finish this chapter today! If you are a business you may want to achieve a result like: I want to double sales by the end of the year! First thing you need to do is decide: What specific result do you want to achieve ? Once you find this out, half the battle is won. Now, whenever you are doing a pa rticular task, ask yourself, does this task help me to achieve the result ? You wil l find that most of the tasks you do in the day, probably do not help you to ach ieve the result . Then why are you doing them? There is nothing complicated about this. If you spend your limited time doing so mething that is useless because even if you do it, it will not help you reach the r esult , then why are you doing it? Don t do it! noAsk your self before taking up any major time consuming activity (1 hour or abov e): Will this help me reach the result ? Please note: You may spend some time each day relaxing . This is okay. You need to relax from time to time to keep the quality and speed of your work high. You may also spend some part of your day exercising . This is also good. These activities help you to work. There are some activities that you do that are not directly related to the result . However, if you do not do them, you will not be able to work towards the result . For example, eating food. You might think that eating food will not help you to achieve the result so why should you do it? Because if you don t do it, you will die of hunger! Food is a very basic example, but I am sure you can differentiate between activi ties that must be done and must not be done. After doing things fast by using the 80/20 rule and not doing all the things tha t don t help you reach your aim, you will find there is a lot of time on your hand s. This is a short article. In this article we have not talked about "recording you r time" and "making a daily schedule". These things are much easier to say than do. They are not practically possible for most people. On indiahowto.com we try to provide you with only practical "How to.." solutions that you can apply. You may be able to form a schedule but there are a large number of random things t hat happen in every bodies day that come in the way of a schedule. This leads to certain work that was to be done in a certain period not being done because tha t time was used up by something that was unpredicted. Over time, work piles up d ue to random interruptions and you will find yourself with a lot of work but littl e time. This is the opposite of what we want from "time management". Personal time management though scheduling is a concept of the past. It is not p ractical. Now, a far more flexible time management system is used. In fact, ther e is no time management anymore. There is personal management that concentrates more on achieving results than managing time . Best Of Luck! Jai Hind.