10 Timeless Time Management Techniques

10 Timeless Time Management Techniques10 Timeless Time Management TechniquesEveryone has the same 24 hours in a day, but some people seem to be so much more productive with that time than others. If youre not feeling productive, the usual solution that comes to mind is that you need to manage your time better. You cant really manage time, though, because there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, and that never changes. You can, however, control where and how you spend your time and take actions to reduce or eliminate time wasters. In fact, managing time is really all about managing yourself. Following are ten timeless ways to take control of your schedule each day to make the most of the time you have available. 1) Establish prioritized goals Withoutgoals, you might find that you tend to chase after whatever seems most urgent or is staring you in the face. Its tough not to get distracted by shiny objects. To prevent this, figure out your true you r priorities in life, and move towards them by setting yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals or desired outcomes. Rank each of ansicht using the following system Importance (Ahigh, Bmedium, Clow)Urgency (1high, 2medium, 3low) Always work on the most urgent and important goals and tasks (A1) first, and then move on down your list. 2) Follow the 80/20 rule The 80/20 Rule, also known as Paretos Principle, says that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your actions. Its a way to view your time usage, prioritize your chosen tasks against your most important goals. Are you focusing in on the 20 percent of activities that produce 80 percent of your desired results? 3) Learn to Say No When others make requests from you, these tasks may be important to them, but conflict with your most important goals. Especially when its something youd like to do, but simply dont have the time for, it can be very difficult to say no. While its great to be a team player, its also imp ortant to know when and how to be assertive and let the person know you cant handle their request at the moment. If you do agree to take on the task, negotiate a deadline that helps them achieve their goals without sacrificing your own. 4) Overcome Procrastination Usingthe 4D System Delete it What are the consequences of not doing the task at all? Consider the 80/20 rule maybe it doesnt need to be done in the first place.Delegate it If the task is important, ask yourself if its really something that you are responsible for doing in the first place. Can the task be given to someone else? See10 Things a Manager Should Never Delegate.Do it now Postponing an important task that needs to be done only creates feelings of anxiety and stress. Do it as early in the day as you can. DeferIf the task is one that cant be completed quickly and is not a high priority item, simply defer it. 5) Eat the Frog FromBrian Traceys book, Eat That Frog, If the first thing you do each morning is to e at a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. Your frogs each day are the tasks that will have the greatest impact on achieving your goals, and the tasks that you are most likely to procrastinate starting. 6) Reduce the Number of Meetings Poorly run meetings are time wasters, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting. See How to Lead a Team Meeting. 7) The Glass Jar Rocks, Pebbles, Sand, and Water Categorize your tasks in this way, then tackle the rocks first. If you keep tackling the small things (the sand, pebbles, and water), and not the important strategic items, the rocks, then your jar will quickly fill up with no room for more rocks. 8) Eliminate Electronic Time Wasters Everyone has certain distractions that interrupt them and take their time away from their work. Is yours Facebook? Twitter? Email checking? Continuous messaging with friends and family? Stop checking them so often by batching these types of tasks. Set a time, then check and verstndigung im strafverfahren with all of them at once. Give yourself 30 minutes and then get back on task. Batch them and take a break once or twice each day to respond. 9) Get Organized In order to effectively manage your time and be productive each day, you have to create the right environment. Eliminating useless clutter, set up an effective filing system, have a nearby place for all of the work items you need frequently, and utilize workflow management tools to help you create a productive environment. 10) Take Care of Your Health A good nights sleep, healthy eating, and exercise will give you the energy, focus, and stamina required to make the most out of your day. It may seem that work is more important and you can always catch up on sleep, food, and exercise later. If you lose your health, though, you cant work, or do much of anything else for that matter, so dont skimp on taking care of yourself.

Know How, Why, and When to Document Employee Performance

Know How, Why, and When to Document Employee PerformanceKnow How, Why, and When to Document Employee PerformanceIn the world of human resources and employment, documentation about an employees performancecan make or break your ability to discipline, terminate, or fairly promote, reward, and recognize employees. Documentation is essential for managers and HR staff because you need to make a serious effort to record all of the events in the employment history of your employees- both positive and negative incidents of performance. Here is everything managers and HR staff need to carefully document employee performance. Why You Should Document Employee Performance Documentation provides evidence that performance issues were discussed with the employee in a timely and concise fashion.Documentation offers a history of the employees improvement or failure to improve performance over time. It is chronological and a precise description of the employees actions, the managers actions, and e vents as they occur.Documentation provides evidence that supports management decisions to take unfavorable action such as discipline or termination with an employee.Documentation offers proof that an employee deserves an available promotion or opportunity over other employees who are also eligible. Documentation provides evidence to justify salary increases, decreases, or why an employee received no raise.In the event of a lawsuit, complete and thorough documentation protects an employers interests. The documentation can support managements actions in terminating an unsuccessful employee. It also can prove that the employee was terminated for reasons that are legal as opposed to others such as illegal discrimination. What to Document Managers need to document employee performance, both positive contributions and performance failures. They need to document exactly what the employee did and said and what the manager did and said in response during the meeting or conversation. You need to document any agreements made during the conversation, goals set, improvements required and expected, and the timeline for improvement. Documentation should also contain commitments that the manager makes to assist the employee. How to Document Documentation should be written during or immediately following the meeting or conversation with the employee. At no time should you miss writing down the conversation on the day when it actuallyoccurred. Waiting until later affects the quality of the documentation because it is based on memory. One of the worst mistakes managers make is to believe that they can reconstruct an employee counseling history as needed. No HR person who has any experience of decent, timely documentation is ever fooled by a reconstructed record. Managers who reconstruct from memory bring unnecessary and unacceptable risk to their company because a made-up history wont hold up in a vermgen lawsuit. You need your documentation to appear professional, neat, and organized. Write documentation as if you are talking about the history to a third party. You never know who may read your documentation one day, so make sure that it reflects your professionalism. (Back of a cocktail napkin, envelope, or sticky note doesnt qualify as professional documentation.) Your documentation should go to an employees new manager if the employee obtains a new job- or you do- in your organization. For your memory and to inform the employees new manager, you need to put the employees name and title, your name and title, and the full date on each document. Write documentation that is factual, fair, legal, objective, complete, and consistent.Avoid opinions (Mike is sloppy. Alice is lazy. Tom was lying to me.),name-calling, editorializing (John is a jerk.Mark has an attitude problem.), and labeling (Mary is irresponsible. George is not a gruppe player.). Avoid also trying to interpret the employees behavior. (Marsha must not like this assignment. Paula appears to be in over her head.) Minimize your use of descriptive words such as adjectives and adverbs (slowly, sloppily, unhappy, moody, rude). State the employees specific behavior and actions, not your opinion or interpretation of it. In documentation, what is needed is an accurate record of the conversation. Stick with the facts and write down just what you said and what the employee said.Make sure that your documentation is unambiguous and that it gets the facts straight. (In any potential legal situation, errors in any of the documented events make all of the documentation suspect.) Finally, document any agreements, commitments, timelines, improvements needed, check-in points, and other details that might slip from memory. Make certain that you set a date and time for deadlines and due dates so that misunderstanding wont occur. Know your HR departments documentation policy, which will tell you what documentation needs placement in the employees personnel fileAny documentation of disci plinary actions should certainly be included. Where to Document and Store Since documentation about employees is confidential and private to the employee, you need to take care that any documentation remains confidential to the manager, HR, and potentially the employees next manager. Thus, putting documentation on a shared computer drive is not recommended. Handwritten documentation and a managers documentation printed out are best kept in locked storage. If you follow these guidelines, when you go to HR to ask for help in disciplining, terminating, or transferring an employee to a job with a better potential fit, HR will help you solve the problem or improve the situation. When HR tells you to document, document, document or they cant help you youll have all of your bases covered. Disclaimer Please note that the information provided, while authoritative, is not guaranteed for accuracy and legality. The site is read by a worldwide audience, and employment laws and regulations va ry from state to state and country to country. Please seek legal assistance, or assistance from State, Federal, or International governmental resources, to make certain your legal interpretation and decisions are correct for your location. This information is for guidance, ideas, and assistance.

Nine Engineering Leaders to Be Recognized at the 2018 Honors A...

Nine Engineering Leaders to Be Recognized at the 2018 Honors A... Nine Engineering Leaders to Be Recognized at the 2018 Honors A... Nine Engineering Leaders to Be Recognized at the 2018 Honors AssemblyASME will pay tribute to the contributions and careers of nine leading engineering innovators during the Honors Assembly at the ASME 2018 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE 2018) next month in Pittsburgh, Pa. The conference, which is the worlds largest interdisciplinary mechanical engineering conference, will take place from Nov. 9 to 15 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Thomas J.R. HughesOne of the honorees, Thomas J.R. Hughes, will be presented with the ASME Medal during the Honors Assembly, to be held Monday, Nov. 12 from 630 p.m. to 730 p.m. Dr. Hughes was selected to receive the medal, which is the Societys highest award, for the pioneering development of computer-aided engineering and design technologies disseminated in ind ustrial and commercial software used throughout the world, thereby improving engineering product development and for originating and leading new fields of computational engineering research, according to the award citation. Hughes, an ASME Fellow, is a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics and the Peter ODonnell Chair in Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. Portonovo AyyaswamyFour other ASME Fellows Portonovo Ayyaswamy, Alan Needleman, Robert M. Nerem and Frank E. Talke will be added to the ranks of Honorary Membership at the ceremony. First bestowed in 1880, ASMEs founding year, Honorary Membership recognizes a lifetime of distinguished service by individuals whose work has contributed substantially to the highest goals of the engineering profession.Dr. Ayyaswamy, the Asa Whitney Professor of Dynamical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, is being honored for exceptional contributions to mechan ical engineering through a career marked with seminal and groundbreaking research scholarship, which has engendered transformational technology transfer for diverse applications and for exemplary professional service to the worldwide scientific and practicing thermal engineering community. A member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty since 1974, he is recognized worldwide for his contributions to various areas of multiscale and multiphase flow, heat and mass transfer. Alan NeedlemanA university distinguished professor at Texas AM University as well as a Texas AM Engineering Experiment Station distinguished research professor in the department of materials science and engineering, Dr. Needleman will be named an Honorary Member for his pioneering research in the fields of computational mechanics and computational materials science. Needlemans contributions include the development of a ductile fracture computational methodology, the development of cohesive surface methods for fracture analysis, and the creation of a framework that enables the solving of general boundary value problems using discrete dislocation plasticity. Robert M. NeremDr. Nerem, who is an institute professor emeritierter hochschulprofessor of mechanical engineering with additional appointments in the chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering departments at Georgia Institute of Technology, is being honored for his outstanding contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of blood flow in health and disease, and the development of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine and for leadership in creating opportunities for engineers to play a vital role in advancing medicine. Nerems recent research interests have involved investigating how differences in the hemodynamic environment result in altered cellular function on different sides of an aortic valve, as well as researching stem cell technology, the role of the mechanical enviro nment in the differentiation of stem cells, and cell manufacturing. Frank E. TalkeThe professor of mechanical engineering and endowed chair at the Center for Memory and Recording Research at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Talke is being named an Honorary Member for his contributions to information storage technology, color inkjet printing and medical device technology. Talke, who began his career nearly 50 years ago at the IBM Research and Development Laboratories, has made significant contributions in the areas of tribology of magnetic recording systems and in the production of a prototype drop-on-demand color inkjet printer. He has conducted ground-breaking research in applying laser Doppler vibrometry to hard disk drives and in studying novel lubricants and additives for the head/disk interface. Gwynne ShotwellAnother honoree at this years ceremony, Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX in Hawthorne, Calif., will be presented with the Ralph Coats R oe Medal. Established in 1972, the award is bestowed upon an individual for an outstanding contribution toward a better public understanding and appreciation of the engineers worth to contemporary society. Shotwell, who is president and chief operating officer of the aerospace and space transportation company SpaceX, is being acknowledged for outstanding leadership in innovation for space commercialization and colonization, for technical contributions to the design of reusable rockets and for dedication to the promotion of STEM education. Shotwell, who started at SpaceX in 2002 as vice president of business development, is responsible for the companys daily operations and for overseeing customer and strategic relations. Kamlakar RajurkarASME Fellow Kamlakar Rajurkar, a College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of NebraskaLincoln, will receive the M. Eugene Merchant Manufacturing Medal of ASME/SME. The awar d is presented to an individual who has played a significant role in improving the productivity and efficiency of manufacturing operations. Dr. Rajukar is being honored for contributions to enhance the productivity of nontraditional machining processes used in automobile, aerospace and medical device manufacturing through extensive research in process modeling as well as sensing and control techniques. The program director for manufacturing machines and equipment at the National Science Foundation from 1999 to 2002, Dr. Rajurkar is the founding director of the Center for Nontraditional Manufacturing Research at the University of NebraskaLincoln and has served in a number of leadership roles within the universitys College of Engineering. Richard William BarnesRichard William Barnes, president of ANRIC Enterprises Inc. in Toronto, Canada, will receive the Melvin R. Green Codes and Standards Medal at this years Honors Assembly. Established as the Codes and Standards meda l in 1976, the award was renamed 20 years later in memory of Melvin Green, who was a dedicated supporter of industrial standards, an ASME Fellow and a longtime Society employee. Barnes is being recognized for distinguished leadership and professionalism in the research, development, promotion, acceptance and application of ASME codes and standards and for direct senior management involvement in the design, construction and operational support of nuclear power plants. An active ASME Standards Certification volunteer and past recipient of the Bernard F. Langer Nuclear Codes and Standards Award, Barnes is a current member and past vice chair of the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Technical Oversight Management Committee, among other positions. Ivar GiaeverThe ninth honoree at this years ceremony, Ivar Giaever, chief technology officer at Applied BioPhysics Inc. in Troy, N.Y., will be presented the Nancy DeLoye Fitzroy and Roland V. Fitzroy Medal for pioneering contributions to the frontiers of engineering that have led to a breakthrough in existing technology, or to new applications or new areas of engineering endeavor. Dr. Giaever, who is also an ASME Honorary Member, will receive the medal in recognition of his innovative experimental research in superconductor tunneling that has advanced the understanding of the phenomenon of superconductivity and led to the development of new scientific instruments. Giaever, who conducted research at the General Electric Research Laboratory for 30 years before joining the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1988, received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize in 1965 and was one of three researchers who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for their work related to tunneling phenomena in solids.For more information on the Honors Assembly and the special events taking place at IMECE 2018, visit go.asme.org/IMECE.