Shopping Cart Time to get your time management skills in order- and what better way to do it than with the new Day-Timer iPhone App! Now sync your Outlook Calendar and Outlook Tasks list directly to your phone so you never miss a beat. Get the download here!
Still need a little more direction? Take the time management quiz from Mind Tools here to identify the aspects of time management that you need help with. Now you can really target your week areas and begin to prioritize your goals and tasks! One way to get everything in check is with the Grid Analysis solution.
Grid Analysis works by getting you to list your options as rows on a table, and the factors you need consider as columns. You then score each option/factor combination, weight this score by the relative importance of the factor, and add these scores up to give an overall score for each option.
While this sounds complex, this technique is actually quite easy to use. Here’s a step-by-step guide with an example. Start by downloading our free worksheet. Then work through these steps:
- List all of your options as the row labels on the table, and list the factors that you need to consider as the column headings. For example, if you were buying a new laptop computer, factors to consider might be cost, dimensions, and hard disk size.
- Next, work your way down the columns of your table, scoring each option for each of the factors in your decision. Score each option from 0 (poor) to 5 (very good). Note that you do not have to have a different score for each option – if none of them are good for a particular factor in your decision, then all options should score 0.
- The next step is to work out the relative importance of the factors in your decision. Show these as numbers from, say, 0 to 5, where 0 means that the factor is absolutely unimportant in the final decision, and 5 means that it is very important. (It’s perfectly acceptable to have factors with the same importance.)
Tip:
These values may be obvious. If they are not, then use a technique such as Paired Comparison Analysis to estimate them.
- Now multiply each of your scores from step 2 by the values for relative importance of the factor that you calculated in step 3. This will give you weighted scores for each option/factor combination.
- Finally, add up these weighted scores for each of your options. The option that scores the highest wins!
You can get the Mind Tool App for the iPhone here to keep on learning!
