Three steps for mid-term time management

October 29th, 2007 by Carmen Schubert

As discussed earlier, goal setting becomes easier once you break them down into subgoals. Then, you should think of appropriate actions and measures that supports you achieving your goal. Breaking down the goal into subgoals gives you a good overview and allows you to monitor the implementation more effectively.

To illustrate how you can effectively set goal, I will take our pyramide that you already know from my last article.

In practice, it is common that you have different contexts where you assign your goals to. Contexts are subject areas that are seperated from each other, for example acquisition, marketing, projects, sport, and further education. With the help of contexts, you are able to structure your goals, tasks, and projects more effectively and hence, keep an overview of your current and future activities.

Once you have allocated your goals to contexts, you can start breaking them down into subgoals or milestones, as we call it. Knowing what actions it takes to achieve your goal, you should roughly plan your work capacity by setting time budgets. Those time budgets tell you how much time you are planning to spend for which project. Now, you have to schedule your activities, meaning that you have to allocate the time budgets of your context to each single workday. Now, you know exactly how much time you are planning to spend for each context. The tartget-performance comparison shows you how exactly your rough planning through time budgets matches with the more detailed planning (scheduling).

Monitoring the process and of course, the results of your goal achievement is hereby essential in all three stages. That’s the approach we have also implemented in our software.