Time management - Information collection part 1

Information collection part 1

Part of time management

One aspect of Time Management is finding out the nature of your main ‘time destroyers’, finding causes and solutions then implementing an action plan to try to eliminate them. This is what we have been looking at elsewhere, see ‘time destroyers’.

This is really personal management of our ‘work load’. We have also touched on personal organisation as an area which can hinder our progress. It is worth looking at just what this entails in a little more detail.

The only reason we are doing any work at all is because we have received information on which we must act.
How we collect this information, disseminate it and act upon it is a very important part of the overall concept of Time Management.

It could be considered completely separately but without it Time Management would falter.

Everything

The information that you are collecting is everything in your working and private life that is not complete.
All the things that require actions to complete.

How and where to?

In the main you don’t have to seek information it comes to you.
It arrives in many forms:

Emails
Telephone messages
In trays
Notes on your desk
Letters in the mail
People drop in etc

The trick is trying to find the best method for dealing with this influx of requests on your time.
We need to know exactly where all of this information will accumulate and what to do with it once we have got it.

We need to make sure we only have the minimum amount of ‘receptacles’ collecting information that we need.
This data will be completely useless unless we access the ‘receptacles’ regularly and sort it for action.

The purpose

The very first thing that you will need to do with any piece of information is decide on its ‘purpose’.
What action is required from your self?

Knowing this can save you a lot of time.
If you know its purpose clearly you will know how to ‘process’ the information which is the first step.

For example:

A journal