Archive for November, 2007

by Eddy Kong WW
Many companies have much difficulties in implementing time management solutions on a company level. Many of their workers are constantly complaining that they are going for an extra “hassle”. There is a saying, “Do not teach an old dog new tricks.” Replacing old habits is harder than replacing software or paper-based timekeeping methods.

In this article, you will learn 2 things :

#1 The benefits of using a time and attendance management solution at your company.

#2 How to use a modified version of a company-level time and attendance management system for their personal lives.

What is actually time and attendance management?

It is actually a system of monitoring of employee work hours for the entire company and the analysis of various human resource figures such as overtime allowance, meal allowance, transport allowance and even bonus that are often derived from employee working hours.

What are the various benefits of such a system?

It will be more clear to employers as a whole and yourself as a senior level management than to your employees. For the management level personnel, such a system allows them to monitor employee performance automatically — and thus allowing them to evaluate if there are any loopholes within the system. It also keep track of employees within the organization by forcing them to be accountable for their absences — once again, better for the business than for the employee himself. That is why most bosses are eagerly engaging in implementing time and attendance management system into their standard operating procedures.

Today’s automated systems offer another benefit — the ability to calculate valuable data about employee performance both on an individual level (how hard does a particular employee work and how much should he be rewarded?) and on an organizational level (what days bring in most absences? Are people staying back to finish up on projects or leaving as quickly as possible?). Access to this information allows the ‘upper management’ to make informed decisions to improve employee performance and productivity on a major scale.

What else can be used in such a system?

A time and attendance management system can also be used as a direct part of employee review at the end of year for staff appraisal.

How you can benefit from using time and attendance management system?

A big part of time management is to ensure that you not only set personal goals but that you work towards achieving them bit by bit every day. With that in mind, using 5 simple ideas on an organization-level strategy to improve your own time management skills. They are:

#1 Identify your top 3 personal goals for the next year and set monthly and weekly deadlines for them.

#2 Put aside a specific, unchanging amount of time every day to work on your top 3 goals.

#3 Log in your efforts daily — what time you started work on your goals, what time you stopped, and whether you actually worked that day or not. Maintain this logging process for at least a month. If you miss a day or have to cut short on a particular day, make sure you write down your reasons why. This is very important for the next step.

#4 At the end of the month, review your log sheets. Are you skipping your personal time? Are you not giving enough time to your personal goals? With these logs, you will know exactly when you took time away from your personal goals and why you did so.

#5 Review the success of your projects and whether you have been meeting your deadlines or not. Do you need more time, or are you being distracted by unnecessary, unimportant tasks?

This way, you constantly review the processes as a self-monitoring time and attendance management system. It will not only help you take a regular pulse on your progress regarding your personal goals but will also act as motivation to improve your time management habits even more.

I hope you find this article both informative and enlightening. Eddy sees the need of having relevant time management information. That is why Eddy has started a useful time management tip and resource guide that help you to manage not only your business effectively but also your personal life properly.

Eddy Kong WW is the webmaster of the Time Management Tips and Resource Blog. Did you find this tip of understanding time and attendance management system useful. You can learn more about other time management tips and strategy at his blog.

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by Cheryl A. Clausen..
Are you trying to cram more into your day? If you are you’re probably stressed out, exhausted, and irritable because you’re working too hard. If this sounds like you take a time out. You’ve got to stop focusing on the wrong things before you burn out. You probably think you just need to figure out how to cram more into your day, but that’s the wrong approach. You’re only focusing on efficiency.

Efficiency comes from doing things in the least amount of time. That’s a good thing, but it isn’t the only consideration. If you can develop ways of approaching important tasks in less time you definitely want to do that.

Have you challenged yourself to determine if you should even be doing the things your spending so much time doing? Effectiveness is about doing the right things rather than doing the unimportant things fast. Those actions that produce the greatest results are th right things you should be very focused on. Effectiveness is about getting the most value from the time you have available. Your main focus should be on taking the actions that produce the greatest results with the least amount of action on your part. When you get caught up thinking you have to take care of a bunch of mundane details you wear yourself out drag yourself down and you have few results to show for all your hard work.

Should a sales person be most concerned about having neatly organized client files with meticulously organized notes, or should they be concerned about the next most valuable contact they should make? Sounds pretty obvious, but how often do you allow hours to get wasted away on insignificant tasks? Then there’s always the gray area where you get caught up on activities that appear to be productive, but they aren’t.

What’s the better choice, spending an hour cold calling complete strangers or attending a breakfast where you’re prospects are likely to attend? The development of good time management skills results from your choices. Make your choices based on the ability of that action to produce results, and never confuse activities with results.

Effectiveness results from both focus and priorities. You have to focus on the actions that produce the greatest results. And you have to prioritize your actions so you always have time for the actions with the highest value, and you never have time for low value activities.

About the author: Cheryl A. Clausen can help you get where you want to be. To find Time Management Tips get her free ecourse. Improve your Time Management Skills, check this out.

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by Cheryl A. Clausen..
Just thinking about everything you need to do may leave you feeling overwhelmed, and unsure about where to start. You may also worry that you aren’t even sure if you know everything you have to do. Here are some time management techniques you can use to get unstuck and going again. The best way to get yourself out of this mess is to identify where you really are. Start with a blank piece of paper and list all the actions you’ve committed to taking. Don’t list things that involve more than one action or ideas.

There are two reasons you want to list actions. Listing actions makes it easy for you to know exactly what you need to do and that makes it easier for you to just do it. Ideas and things that involve more than one action require your mind to sort through the idea and identify the individual actions every time you see it on your list and that just adds to your stress and wastes time.

Increasing your feelings of overwhelm and stress are exactly what you don’t want. When you list actions there are no decisions involved, and you don’t have to take time to figure things out every time you look at your list. You just see the action, decide on which action to take, and take the action. What do you do with those ideas and multiple action things? Just enter the next logical action you need to take on your list. If your idea is something you want to take action on someday, but not now park it on a separate idea list.

With everything on one list, even though it may be multiple pages, you’re ready to start to figure out what to do. The best way to make good time decisions is to set aside some thinking time where you can begin to define your long term goals. You have to figure out what you really want to accomplish where you really want to be in life so you don’t behave like a mindless automaton.

The mindless automaton just goes through the motions each day allowing everyone and everything else to decide how they will invest their time. If you want to succeed at anything in life you never want to behave this way. Rather know where you want to go and how you’re going to get there so you can develop good time management skills.

Knowing where you’re going and why, enables you to decide what to do next. There will always be too many things on your list to do everything on your list at once, but you can decide on the things that you need to take off your list and I want you to do that now. Be ruthless about removing anything that isn’t moving you closer to your big picture goals, and then prioritize the top three actions you need to take each day one day at a time. You’ll get where you want to be before you know it if you commit to taking action on the three most important things each day.

author: Cheryl Clausen can help you get unstuck. Valuable Time Management Tips get her free analysis. Enhance your Time Management Skills, look here.

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by Danny Welsh
You’ve really got to learn how to master time if you want to improve your lifestyle and achieve your goals. Time management is not the sexiest of topics—but such is life.

After deducting the “necessities” from the average person’s day-to-day routine, most people honestly have an average of something like 2 hours and 42 minutes per day with which you have to work to change your life for the better.

If you don’t believe me see my other articles on this subject, or take the challenge yourself and get really disciplined for one month in recording your time expenditures.

I hope you do, and I hope you find that all your free time is going to improve your lifestyle and help achieve your goals.

But for most people, they simply must use their discretionary time more intelligently than many of the activities that are popular to spend your “free” time doing— activities that add NOTHING of value to a life. And, if these people care… if they truly care… about improving their lifestyle and achieving their goals…

This Has Got To Stop!

So, what comes first? What’s the action plan for getting every second chance out of every minute we’ve got?

I’m gonna tell you what I think, and what works for me (usually anyway!) but, before I do, I want to make an important observation: Many people hate it when I write stuff like this. They think I’m judging them, or else they think this type of information is not as usable or tangible as the hard-hitting techniques I usually write.

That’s crap. These readers don’t want to get the fundamentals right… no… they want to skip right to the “details” or the “magic formula”. But, listen up: your life is already filled with details, tons of them, to the point that your mental file cabinet is tossing out more information EVERYDAY for lack of use or need than your computer could ever hold…and, of all these details, NONE are doing a darn thing to enhance your life.

Unless you’re clear on the basics, the details just pour over the cup.

Here’s something else: Success in life or in business isn’t necessarily complicated. I honestly think it can be and should be simple. The real answers are, really, so simple… they are almost corny. But “simple” is like Forrest Gump’s momma said: “Simple is as simple does”. Simple does NOT by any means mean “easy”. Running an ultra marathon over broken pavement in the scorching heat of Death Valley is very simple. All you have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other for 50+ miles.

Simple as can be. Difficult beyond reason.

I want something for you, something kinda big. I want this year, starting TODAY, to be absolutely special for you. I want you to achieve more this year than you have achieved in all the previous years of your life. Of course, that means you’ve got a lot of “details” to attend to in the coming 365 days… but to really achieve something of note… you’ve got to attend to the right details.

In order for this to be that year for you…we need to get this in pinpoint-specific focus for you. Let’s see if I can get a commitment from you. Just for approximately the next 30-days. Just from the time you read this letter and the time your calendar pops up “Finally Done!” 30 days from today. I’m not gonna lie. This is gonna be SIMPLE. In fact, it could even be EASY. But for some of you…you just won’t do it regardless of how much you realize it could benefit you greatly.

Oh well. I’m throwing it out there for everyone anyway.

This commitment will cost you maybe 20 or 30 bucks and will likely take less than five minutes of your time for each of the next 30-days.

Here’s all I’m gonna ask you to do: Go to a local drug store, a Radio Shack or wherever and get yourself one of those cheap micro cassette recorders and 30 of those little micro cassettes. You’re welcome to get a digital voice recorder and pay more (they’ve got some awesome features), but that’s not necessary.

Keep your recorder with you at all times during this month experiment and use one micro cassette each day to keep a running “time log.” Use it approximately once every hour of your day to take a quick bearing on how you spent the preceding hour. Your audio entries should only take a few seconds each.

They should sound something like this:

“7:15 to 7:50:” Drove to office.
“7:50 to 8:40:” Breakfast and newspaper
“8:40 to 9:30:” Returned work emails from coworkers about upcoming project
Etc., etc., etc.

That’s it.

That’s all I want you to do. I know, I know. You’re already twelve steps ahead of me. In fact, you’re ready to graduate without taking any tests because “you already know what this is all about”.

Think you already know the basis of my evil convoluted scheme to change your life for the better?

Baloney.

You don’t have a clue. Please just trust me on this. All you’ve possibly got on the line to lose is $20 or $30 and a couple or three hours out of one lousy month.

Flip the coin over and all you’ve got to possibly gain is everything you’ve ever wanted to achieve in this life.

Think I’m exaggerating? Think again. Look, stop thinking you’re so darn sophisticated. So darn smart. So far above doing a simple exercise like this. Let me tell you something…

Knowledge is not power.

APPLIED knowledge is power.

Until you’re applying this, you don’t ‘know’ a darn thing!

Danny Welsh invites you to visit America’s #1 Real Estate Network now and join a prosperity network and attract abundance by investing in real estate today. Some people own their time…do you? Come learn more today at no cost with the team at www.homeinvestingsolution.com

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by Matt Bacak1
Let’s talk about time management. This can be tricky, confusing, and difficult for many people. Time management is about having the right number of tasks, doing the right tasks, and protecting yourself from distractions.

What strategies can you do to get more control over your time?

Time Management Strategy #1: Sit down every morning and write down the tasks that you absolutely have to get done for that day. Use a small piece of paper because this is better psychologically.

After you have written down the tasks, examine them. Are they tasks or projects? For example, create an Autoresponder campaign is a project because it has multiple things that have to be done. So instead you have to break down this project into tasks. Your list should contain tasks only. You should be able to check these tasks off as completed or not completed.

Also next to each task write down how long you think it will take to complete the task. Look at how much time you have available. This will enable you to know right from the start whether or not you wrote down too many tasks. If you have too many tasks and not enough time then you will become stressed out. Avoid this by planning your tasks accordingly.

Time Management Strategy #2: Block out the distractions. Physically write down in your calendar the time you are going to work on your tasks. Treat this time as an appointment with yourself that you can’t break. If somebody calls and wants to do something during this time then explain that you are unavailable because you have an appointment. It doesn’t matter that the time is with yourself. You have to respect yourself.

Tip: Don’t answer the phone or even look at the caller ID when you are working in your scheduled time. Turn off the phone ringer and turn on voicemail. You can schedule breaks in which you check your messages, stretch, and recoup.

Time Management Strategy #3: Restructure your habits as to what you have been accustomed to. Change your habits to writing your list in the morning and planning your time.

Time Management Strategy #4: Don’t multitask. Focus on one task at a time. You will be more efficient. You will accomplish the tasks faster individually then if you worked on the tasks simultaneously.

Time Management Strategy #5: Know thy self. You know how long you can focus on a particular task. You know when your interest and energy wanes. Learn to identify these times and work on a different task to keep you motivated and interested.

Matt Bacak began investing his first earnings at the tender age of 12, a young businessman in the making. Now, 15 years later, Bacak survived failed businesses, botched partnerships, heavy credit card debt and bankruptcy - all in preparation for the accomplishments he has achieved today as a well-established Internet millionaire and best-selling author. For more information, visit http://www.powerfulpromoter.com or sign up for his Powerful Promoting Tips at http://www.promotingtips.com

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