It’s official. Eighty percent of working professionals admit to being thoroughly incompetent at managing that one most vital resource – time. To rate your skills in this department, take the following short test:

Do you find yourself constrained for time?

Do you keep wishing there were at least forty-eight hours in a day?

Do you live by the motto – ‘so little work, so little time’?

If you answered ‘yes’ or even ‘maybe’ to any of the questions, then it’s, well, time you pulled your socks up and did something about it. Feast on the following wonderful ways to get your job done:

Scour the internet for resources on time management.

The first thing you must do is look up the net for information on how to manage your time. Log on to the World Wide Web and do a search. If you are experienced at working Google, then in a short span of ten minutes you will have no less than a million web pages at your fingertips, all expounding on the various theories on how you should make the most of your time. Going through all this information would take up at least five hours or so.

Read a book on time management.

Didn’t find what you were looking for on the net? Find a self-help book instead. It will list out all the guiding principles one should follow so as to get as much of their work done in a day.

Of course, be careful when you’re reading these books. Make sure you’re not assimilating all the stuff that’s written in it. In fact, what you should do is, if the book has a bibliography at the end, borrow all the books listed there from the library, and devour all the information on time management you can get your hands on.

Don’t swallow information in little nuggets – absorb it in big dollops instead. Remember, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So stock up heavily on your GK – it’s the best way to keep yourself out of danger.

Don’t buy any organizers or time-charts.

You know those little books that make you list your activities hour-wise – atrocious devices, really. Who would actually want to fill up a table full of times and places and things to do? After all, the time (oops, sorry, there’s that word again!) it takes to fill up all those pages could be used to do some real work, couldn’t it, like checking e-mail, for example.

Don’t look at your watch.

It is an established phenomenon – stealing glances at your watch makes it tick slower when you’re getting bored, and faster when you’re having a great time. Now you know why it takes you only a minute to read the Great Indian Column, and another to rate it 5 out of 5!

In the Indian context, time is rated really low – even lower than Laloo Prasad. We don’t worry our pretty heads too much about wasting time, especially if it’s someone else’s.

After all, even IST has been rechristened Indian Stretchable Time.

Quote of the Week:

The trouble with being punctual is that there's nobody there to appreciate it.
-- Harold Rome