Day: July 19, 2022

Why Do Online Students Need Time Management?

It’s easy not the take online learning seriously. With regular classroom learning, you have a specific place you need to be at a specific time. But, learning online requires you to set aside some time on your own to study and go through the lessons. This requires discipline and a real understanding about how to wisely use your time throughout the day.

The truth is that time is just like any other finite resource. If you don’t learn how to manage your time wisely, you won’t be able to get things done as efficiently as possible. You may miss out on meeting your goals, fail to study often enough, and get too far behind on your lessons. Even if you don’t have those specific problems, time management is also about helping you avoid stress while juggling everything.

If you’re always wishing you had more hours in the day, you don’t know where all your time went, or you feel stressed by everything you need to do, learning time management might be a solution to all of those problems.

Can Anyone Learn To Manage Their Time Better?

While some people may be naturally gifted in organizing themselves, time management is a skill that can be taught and learned. It’s the same as any other resource management. You’ll put a little time investment in at the beginning to plan and strategize how to use your time efficiently. If you’re diligent to learn this skill well, your little investment will help you reap enormous benefits in your online learning by making you more efficient and less stressed.

It’s useful to learn time management sooner rather than later. Take this skill seriously. Learning time management can keep you on top of your classwork, help you stay ahead of assignment deadlines, and free up some extra time you didn’t know you had for extra studying or relaxing. It’s something anyone anywhere can learn at any point in their life, even if you’ve never been good at it before.

Time Management For Students – Strategies And Tips To Maximize Time Utilization

Do you find your child overwhelmed with the tasks to be finished in the few hours left after school? For school-going children, juggling between homework, the other tasks like hobby class, project work, play, and routine activities is a bit too much. On top of it, if exams are approaching, time management for students becomes even more essential.

Not only for the kids, it is overwhelming for you as parents as well, when you see your child struggling between different tasks. This, in turn, makes you push your child to hurry up, making things even more complicated for them.

How To Improve Time Management Skills

Wondering how to begin? No worries. Let’s start by observing your child’s daily activities as to what activities they are involved in and how much time they take to complete those tasks.

Another valuable source of feedback is through Parent-Teacher Meeting. Regular interaction with your child’s teacher can help you get some understanding of the essential concepts and lessons they teach, so that you can make the school year’s schedule more manageable and help your child prioritize their work for the long term too.

1. Let The Child Prepare Their Planner

Let’s start with the simple activity — by helping your child prepare their calendar-planner that’ll list the dates, and a schedule of activities to be completed each day. Prepare a planner that is easy to understand for your child by using different colors for each subject.

With their planner – calendar, your child will understand the importance of days and timelines better. The sooner your kids learn to prepare and follow their schedule, the sooner and more independent they will become. Know more about various tools of time management.

2. Set Priorities

The master schedule or the planner calendar will help your child to set some specific goals each day, like which particular chapter to be read in an English subject today, or how many mathematical sums to be solved from a particular chapter, and so on.

3. Set Time Aside For Important Projects

4. Set Realistic Goals For Each Study Session

Students sometimes overestimate what they can accomplish each day. They include too many activities for a day in their daily planner, that it might not be realistic to achieve in one single day. Consequently, unable to manage to complete everything as intended, leaves them discouraged and demotivated to study.

To prepare a realistic schedule,

It may not be possible to follow a schedule to a minute. But your child will be far more productive by using the schedule for keeping a track of work to be done, rather than not using it at all.

5. Begin Early After The School

Make it a point to have a look over your child’s master schedule as well as their school diary daily. Find out what homework or assignments need to be completed and if there are any other assignments to be submitted the following day.

Encourage your child to start working on their homework right after school so that no work is left unfinished. This will help them to keep their work up to date on a daily basis.

6. Leave No Scope For Procrastination

The vicious cycle continues until the last moment when it is urgently required to be completed. And consequently, completing the assignments haphazardly, could lead to deteriorate the quality of their work and impact their grades.

To avoid procrastination, try this:

• Keep a track of all your immediate tasks and the ones which have a due date later.
• Create a calendar or schedule with all the deadlines and due dates for submission of homework, assignments, or projects so that you can see the big picture.
• Now make your daily To-Do List with the help of this calendar.
• Break down the larger tasks into smaller ones that can be quickly achieved.
• For example, if your child needs to submit their Science Project in the following week, help your child allocate some time aside for the science project each day.
• Before they know it, they will be ready with the project, way before the date of submission, without straining themselves at the last moment.

7. Work On One Task At A Time. Do Not Multi-Task.

It might appear being tactful and accomplished by multitasking , but it is the other way round. Splitting your attention to more than one task at a time will divert your focus and deteriorate the quality of your work.

8. Take Short Breaks

Working or focusing on one particular topic for too long is likely to cause students’ minds to lose concentration and wander more. Tiny breaks between the tasks is a good way to give your child some time to get recharged and come back focused.

Depending upon your child’s attention span, decide a break time for them, and allow them to relax. For example, for every 45 minutes of school work, let your child take a short break of 10-15 minutes to recharge.

Resource:

https://elearningindustry.com/time-management-in-online-learning-importance
https://peppyzing.com/time-management-for-students/

Top 7 Career Options in Management To Choose [For Freshers & Experienced]

Today, both young aspirants and working professionals are attracted to management careers, and rightly so. Besides promising a host of exciting and rewarding career options, a management career allows you to take over people-centric roles, gain a respectable position in the workplace, and take home a hefty annual salary package.

After pursuing a management career, you can rise to top management positions in companies where you can make impactful changes powered by data-driven business strategies. For instance, you’ll be better equipped to create meaningful changes in a company, such as enforcing better utilization of resources, streamlining business operations, supervising staff’s performance, planning business campaigns, and so much more.

Typically, organizations offer a wide range of managerial positions, ranging from front-line supervisory positions (Sales Manager, R&D Executive, General Manager, etc.) to the top executive level such as CEO, COO, and CTO. Managers in all tiers within a company are together responsible for its smooth functioning as an efficient and successful business entity.

This is the first step in the career management system and provides self-introspection. What are your interests, what is essential for you, what are the things you value, what are the things you like, what are your unique skills etc. are some questions that need to be answered in this phase for discovering specific things about yourself.

• Career values – It is essential to integrate work values with overall life values to know what is necessary for you in life. It is the work values that acts as a guiding force and helps to focus on the essential things. An individual who is happy and satisfied in personal life will quickly achieve better productivity. Remember, work values keep on changing at intervals, and it becomes essential to keep on reassessing them regularly for overall job success.
• Work preferences – Work preferences play a significant role in career development planning. It is a personal choice, and it is quite natural for two people to have different work preferences in life. Dig deeper to assess and identify work preferences and, if necessary, take the help of assessment tools for your purpose.
• Strengths – Understand your strengths if you are interested in career exploration/career development planning. Look for positive qualities like hard-working, detail-oriented, excellent communication skills, and also specific traits like good at decision making, soft skills, etc. to develop your full potential. The more specific your abilities and qualities are, the more you will be successful in the job interviews.
• Weakness – Just like strengths, it is also essential to identify your weakness if you are interested in career exploration/career development planning. Hiring managers pay special attention to the weakness of the applicants, and often one of the job interview questions is what do you consider your weakness. An honest understanding of your weakness will help you in overcoming them in time so that you are not embarrassed by it at any moment. Do not be overly self-critical as this step is designed so that a person can call attention to perceived weaknesses and take matters in hand to eliminate them.

Technology is reigning supreme in all the spheres of our life. All the technical devices like tablets, phones, and computers have become necessary in the workplace and often determine how we are managing our work life.

One of the most critical aspects of career exploration/career development planning is effective networking. It is an essential asset that can take your career a step further. Develop and hone your ability to connect and interact with important people.

Weird Advice For Young Designers

I recently worked on a pro bono project for a friend, and it reminded me of a time early in my career and how lucky I was then to get such great advice from the more seasoned pros around me. Advice that ultimately saved me from some major pitfalls. I made mistakes here and there over the course of nearly 20 years of projects, but with each hiccup came a lesson. Here are some takeaways from my lessons learned and all that sage advice.

Questions Equal Clarity

Clients come to us designers for our expertise, and it is our job to guide them through the process. We are helping them find clarity about their vision and goals for their project. To do that well means asking questions! It is important to remember that not all clients are going to be good at communicating their vision—and that’s okay. You can still work with them and get amazing results by asking them lots of questions and following up on those answers with more questions until you’re both on the same page. This dialogue will help set clear expectations for project scope, deliverables, and everything in between while avoiding frustration for both parties.

Think about the word ‘classic.’ Now think of five things that could be described as ‘classic’—it probably varies wildly, right? So, which version does your client imagine? You could guess… or you could clarify with more questions like “Can you show me an example of what ‘classic’ looks like to you?” or “What makes this classic?” And so on. It’s a silly example, but it illustrates just how subjective descriptions can be and how necessary it is to have good communication between you and the client. Remember that your clients don’t do this for a living, so asking questions will help you get to the root of any issue quickly with less time spent guessing. And no, it won’t look unprofessional if you ask a lot of questions, but it will make you a better creative.

Collaboration For The Win

On one side of the table, you have a designer with knowledge and experience. On the other side of the table, you have the client who knows their business, audience, and goals. As creatives, we have to remember that we are on the same team as our clients and aim at collaboration over confrontation. Design should be a collaborative process: both parties are at the table with different perspectives and different knowledge to contribute. It is this diversity of viewpoints that will make the creative stronger and your client ultimately happier.

When you work collaboratively with your clients, they’ll often tell you what they need before even realizing it themselves—and sometimes, those needs are things that they didn’t even realize they wanted until after having talked it through with someone else! This is because people often have trouble articulating what they need out loud (even if they think they know exactly what they want), so getting clients involved in the process can help ensure that everyone’s needs and project goals are met.

It all boils down to communication. Everyone at the table, both clients and designers, want to feel heard and respected. Good communication and listening skills are a way to ensure that clients understand that they don’t need to be designers themselves, but they are still contributing meaningfully to the project. This helps keep them fully invested in a great outcome.

Contracts Are Your Friend

Contracts can help you set clear expectations for both parties. The best way to protect your business and make sure you don’t get burned by a client is to have a signed contract before doing any design work. If you’ve ever been burned by a client (or had to fire one) it’s probably because you didn’t have a contract in place when you started the project with them.

As a designer, it can feel a little awkward to send a contract and you may be tempted to just dive right into the work even when a client hasn’t signed a contract. But there are several reasons why you should always, ALWAYS get a contract signed before doing any design work.

First, this will help you protect yourself from scope creep. Clearly defining the project scope is essential. If the client wants to add extra elements or changes their mind four times about what they need to be designed, it’s much easier when you have a contract and clearly defined deliverables to say, “Sorry, but we have to go back and renegotiate the scope of our agreement.” This way, you won’t end up doing more work than you agreed on.

Resources:

https://www.upgrad.com/blog/career-options-in-management/
https://www.marketing91.com/career-management/
https://www.workitdaily.com/career-management-defining-process-purpose
https://www.mbaknol.com/human-resource-management/career-management-definition-and-meaning/
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/is-management-for-me-2275352

How to deal with difficult coworkers

There may come a time in your career when you find yourself working with a difficult and even confrontational coworker. You may try to avoid them, but that’s not always possible when you work together. So, how do you successfully deal with difficult coworkers? How do you resolve difficult situations and make it bearable to work with them?

Dealing with a difficult coworker can be especially frustrating if you don’t know why they’re being difficult in the first place. Does their personality rub you the wrong way or are they purposefully trying to make you miserable?

Take some time to think about what’s happening. Is it only happening to you, or are other coworkers feeling the same way? Once you understand the reason behind the actions of your coworker, begin thinking of solutions. Is this something you can solve? Or, will you need help from your manager?

The one thing you cannot do, is nothing at all. Just ignoring the problem isn’t going to solve anything. Understanding the situation may help you find a solution that’ll make work a little more enjoyable.

Be kind

It’s not easy, but whether someone is unknowingly bothering you or purposefully trying to get a rise out of you, it’s best to be kind. Don’t indulge difficult coworkers by reacting to their comments or actions. Acting kindly may eventually lead to the coworker being kind back which will result in a much happier workplace.

If being kind to your coworker doesn’t stop them from making your day miserable, walk away. Do your best to avoid them whenever you can. If you don’t have to work with them directly, then minimize your interactions with them. Continue to be nice, but don’t be baited. It may be tempting to have it out with the individual who’s bothering you, but inevitably this’ll only lead to more problems. If tensions seem to be getting high or you feel yourself getting irritated, then walk away.

When Things Don’t Change

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the difficult person may continue being difficult. It happens. If that’s your situation, there are still ways you can work with a difficult person without damaging your professional reputation.

— Don’t Take It Personally

Easier said than done, but try not to take things personally. Often difficult people treat everyone the same way. So, try to remember that it’s not about you. It’s about them and their behavior.

— Ignore Them

Whenever possible, ignore the difficult person. Go out of your way not to interact with them. If that’s not possible, consider only communicating with them in writing. Or, have a trusted coworker attend all of your interactions with that person. This can not only help keep your responses in check, but it can also act as a buffer. The difficult person may not be quite so difficult when it’s not just the two of you in the room.

— Let It Go

— Take It Up a Level

Finally, be prepared to get your manager or even HR involved. This should only be used as a last resort, though. But if you feel you’re out of options, bring it to the appropriate higher-ups. Use facts and figures, not feelings or emotions, to make your case. Just bear in mind that HR or your manager may not get involved and instead tell you that it’s up to you and the difficult person to “figure it out.”

Make sure to focus on their behavior rather than making it too personal

You may want to know if their behavior is intentional or not and work from there to either remedy the situation or talk it out. Depending on the type of coworker you’re dealing with, whether they take credit for your work or give you a hard time, you never know what may be the underlying reason for their behavior.

If someone is complaining too much and is stalling progress, you can redirect their perspective or change the subject while encouraging them to better their circumstances. There’s always a possibility that your coworker doesn’t mean to come off rude or condescending and doesn’t realize they are stalling or hurting you in any way.

However, if it becomes clear that there is a particular dislike between you, you can discuss why and how you can resolve the issues and decide the best course of action. Sometimes, opening up the conversation for positive discourse is all you need to clear up any discontentment.

There isn’t a complete workplace without the certainty of coworkers – therefore, you can’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and make any concerns known to ensure you’re able to work at the best of your abilities.

Source:

https://blog.jostle.me/blog/how-to-deal-with-difficult-coworkers
https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/5-tips-for-working-with-difficult-people/
https://upjourney.com/how-to-deal-with-a-difficult-coworker