Introduction
“Some people believe that the best approach to effective time management is to make detailed daily and long- term plans and then to adhere to them. However, this highly structured approach to work is counterproductive. Time management needs to be flexible so that employees can respond to unexpected problems as they arise.” Many people think that managing time is an easy task but sometimes it does not prove to be so and I agree with this statement.
Main text
Managing time can be quite a hard task because can never know if anything unexpected can happen along the way. Planning one’s daily activities is effective in that one will be focused and will avoid confusion during the day, but planning is one thing and following the plans the whole day is another. Many unexpected things occur during the day, for example, a person plans to attend an early meeting but on the way to the meeting place there could be a lot of traffic and one might end up delaying the meeting. The schedule frame automatically changes from there on, but that is not the main issue because the time one had is now very little he/she might be forced to weigh the important things and attend to them first and at the end of the day one will find that some of the things planned were not fulfilled.
I also share the same views on the fact that time needs to be flexible because there can arise unexpected matters. The employees can be following a specific work schedule but there can be occurrences that can be more important to the employees than the work at hand. Therefore, the employer should be prepared in case such a situation occurs. Another employee can be able to step in for the absent one and time schedule will not suffer a lot.
However, the plan can be effective in areas where the employees are committed to it or else it will fail miserably. If the employees are fond of procrastination then this can be a big problem. To post pone duties just leads to them piling up and later there will not be enough time to take care of all of them at once. An employee may choose to postpone work due to an emergency but there are those that will postpone just because they are lazy and in times like this, the planned schedule will just be hopeless.
Another reason why I agree with this is that I have had personal experience. At the place where I worked, we were supposed to follow a strict time schedule. At first, it seemed to work but as the days went by, it got stressful, as one could not just leave to attend to other matters without having someone fill in for you. This routine could not go on for much longer because everybody had his or her set goals to accomplish by the end of the day. The time schedule did not last that long because within no time, employees were procrastinating and work was not being completed on time and this just caused the company to lag behind.
Conclusion
Therefore, a detailed daily plan is likely to work out in areas where the employer allows the employees to take time out incase of any emerging issues. The employee should just be able to manage their own time wisely and try to finish the work assigned to them but if they are out of time, the work should be assigned to someone else. A detailed time schedule may not be the best method of managing time but it is effective to some extent.