Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [719]
To be successful at time management, the third question of “When?” must be answered repeatedly. The simplest way to improve your use of time is to use some type of daily planner (electronic or paper) to provide hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly calendars for recording your plans. At the beginning of each term, enter your important work and school activities, such as (for work) projects, reports, and meetings, and (for school) tests, term papers, projects, football games, and parties on the monthly, weekly, and daily planning portions of the planner. Add your doctor, dentist, hairdresser, and club meeting appointments to your planner. The monthly and weekly overviews provide you an indication of what is coming up and times of peaks and valleys in your current workload. One approach many students have found useful in time management is to change their daily routine. Go to bed early on weekdays and get up early to study or exercise. You are fresh and alert and have few interruptions. Similarly, many white-collar professionals get to work before others so they have quiet time to get important tasks finished without interruptions.
The fourth question is, “How?” How are you going to accomplish your daily objectives? For example, how do you work or study best? For a project, do you first lay out all the tasks yourself or get the project team together and draft a project plan? In studying, for example, do you first skim a chapter; second, read it; third, go back and underline important items; and forth, review your underlined items? In an examination of used textbooks at a college bookstore, more than half (in some cases almost all) of the text within each chapter was highlighted. This suggests that most students skip the skim activity, and read and underline simultaneously. This undesirable approach was verified by taking a student poll in a number of college classes.
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Operations Planning and Control Functions
Once you have determined your daily activities, You must focus on completing them. Focus translates into performing four interrelated functions which are required to plan and control your activities. These functions are priority planning, priority control, capacity planning, and capacity control. They are defined as:
1. Priority planning: The process of determining the sequence of activities based on their relative importance. What should be performed first, second, third? What should be set aside for another time? What should not be performed (errors of commission)?
2. Capacity planning: The process of determining the time and resources required to perform a task (capacity required) and comparing them to your available time (capacity available). In this planning, avoid multitasking; focus on one task at a time. Unless wait time is involved in an activity, focusing on one activity at a time usually reduces the time involved and improves the quality of the activity.
3. Priority control: The process of executing the priority plan and making changes to the sequence based on current needs and conditions. Interruptions happen; try to reduce the possibility of them occurring. Sometimes an interruption is important and you have to reprioritize your activities. Try to finish what you are doing before starting the new activity.
4. Capacity control: The process of comparing your actual time and resources to perform a task to the capacity plan and making capacity adjustments to your work schedule based on your actual progress. Most people underestimate the time required for an activity and then suffer the consequences. Track the accuracy of your time estimates so you can learn to estimate activity times better.
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While these terms may seem foreign to you at first, you intuitively perform these functions throughout your daily activities. For example, you are planning your day and you want to drop off some clothes at the dry cleaner