The Time Thief － the next bestseller

No book thief here, but time thieves surround us to “take” our time …

‘My time is lost! Hey, who stole my time?’

‘Who could stole your time!? Come on, you’ve just wasted your own precious time.’

As for the dialogue, believe it or not – most of us encourage ourselves or even our acquaintances to cherish invaluable time, but who take actions as a matter of fact? Numerous people realise that time is important to a certain extent, especially for those who have projects ahead of schedule. Yet how many people actualise the standard of their lifestyle?

There is no denying that NOT so many people concern themselves seemingly with the irreversible time nowadays. Meanwhile, more and more people prefer to veg rather than plan. What’s the problem? Does anything bother humankind or are human beings getting lazier and lazier than before?

All of us completely comprehend that it is equal absolutely for everyone to have his/her 24 hours a day. We fully understand that people need some periods to take a break because ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ as a proverb goes. Hence, human have energy again, again and again for the next steps in anything but ordinary general administration.

Let us get back to the main point – How do we manage our time? Dr Taho Yang (楊大和), a professor from Institute of Manufacturing Information and Systems, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) highly recommends people these critical tips below –

1) MOTIVATION: There could be something that motivates you to become self-starter, so try to discover your passions for long-term goals.

2) STIMULATION: Find someone to spur yourself on specific aims.

3) CONVERSION: Your habit is the most crucial point for time-killing if you get accustomed to veg all in your lifetime.

Those three keywords could give tens of trillions of people to make a chance as well as change themselves. Furthermore, the core values are derived from –

1) TIME management: Set up your milestones e.g. short-term, mid-term and long-term goals in your life. This concept is similar to schedule management and also relevant with project management.

2) OPERATION management: Complete your production life cycle i.e. to accomplish something at one go as well as carry out an undertaking from start to finish as a good example would be advantageous.

3) PROJECT management: From the initiation, planning, execution, monitoring to the closure of project, managing your lifetime is like a great project to better think for your future.

Another part of time management is goal setting[1], which is in terms of management by objectives[2] (MBO). Not merely do we need to be hard-working, yet we chase truly after what we want to have. Some features from goal setting are as follows –

1) Accurate Definition: Every goal you set should be precise with certain standards but without any ambiguity.

2) Appropriate Challenge: Rise to the challenge on your tasks.

3) Anticipative Reflection: What you make unremitting efforts can be expected, but do not expect too much.

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[1] goal setting: a theory derived from motivation which is proposed by Edwin A. Locke in 2006.

[2] management by objectives (MOB): aka quota management, a theory for business administration proposed by Peter F. Drucker in the late 1960s.

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With the contribution of information technology, trillions of technological tools have been reconsidered originally from what human beings did in the past, recreated by abundant developers as well as released with tons of applications on the Internet. Online calendar is quite convenient for people to tag up-to-date missions, retrieve from the stuff you take and inspect every item that would be all set in particular. One more thing, do not set many and diverse targets that too much more than you can do since it might be impossible to strive for unrealistic plans; you would give up on them in consequence.

Refer to the dialogue as the first paragraph, it is not how much time we have wasted; it is how many items we have been effected! For those who desire good preparation by time management, try to control each one of periods in your schedule. What you could do is arrange administrative affairs appropriately, schedule specific stuff simultaneously as well as manage multifarious missions immediately!

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FURTHER READING

Zeller, Dirk. (2015). Successful Time Management For Dummies. 2nd Edition, Wiley.

Ramnath, Jyoti. (2016). Find Time for your goals with Google Canlendar. The Keyword, Google.