Managing starts with Tracking
Managing your Time, Money, Business or Weight all start with the same FIRST STEP.
Track your Time (ditto for the other 3 so just cut and paste).
Keep a track / log of what you want to track (in this case time). Enter what you did during the day – preferably enter it ONLINE classifying your time spent into the following:
– personal work
– administrative work
– client call / visiting a client
– browsing the net (useful)
– browsing the net (useless)
– briefing the juniors for work
– time waited by seniors in endless meetings
– travel (useful and useless)
– coffee corner
– lunch / break
– face book
Maintain an excel sheet or use some online tracking tool. Once you start writing down in such detail, you will realize that time is NEVER WASTED IN bulk – it is always frittered away in small minutes. Standing here and there, chasing some juniors (which can be done by somebody lower), meetings (grrrrr you cannot wish it away).
End of the day tag them as ‘if i do not do it I, my boss or my business will die’ (top most), urgent, important, time pass,…..’
the advantage of doing it in excel or using a software is it is easy to tabulate at the end of the week, month or quarter…..
Now apply the same thing to money, business and weight. Ditto. It works.
What gets Measured, gets Managed. Simple.
Akhilesh Pathak
Dear Subra Sir,
As always. most profound advice in simplest words.
I can vouch for the benefits of this kind of measurement and planning from my own personal experience of managing my finances.
From a modest SIP of Rs 500 in HDFC Prudence Fund, 7 Yrs back I have been regularly looking at the % returns of my own MF portfolio vs the MF schemes which are performing better than benchmarks and My own MFs and what are their core holdings ( morning star provides detailed holdings of MF updated quarterly). It has really helped me choose better MFs like HDFC Equity, IDFC Premier Equity, Franklin India Prima Plus etc. Also I started investing in stocks taking cues from some of the MFs top holdings.
Of-course blogs like yours and your messages on FB have created more long term investors than the fund houses or agents selling the financial weapons of mass destruction !