Time management is a common problem faced by most of us. Oftentimes, when you are swarmed with multiple tasks at once, it becomes extremely difficult to identify which ones you must complete first. Too often, people eat up what is supposed to be their free time to be able to accomplish all pending tasks in time.

It takes a considerate amount of skill in order to manage your time properly. If you are one of these people, you are usually able to control your time efficiently that you can even finish tasks ahead of time.

Let’s try to analyze the importance of Time management in different fields.

Time Management in School

Due to more freedom merited to college students, it can become quite challenging for new (freshman) students to cope with time management. The liberty to choose your own schedule readily creates a false notion that they can do whatever the want. On the other hand, it reflects one’s priorities and how you are able to properly appropriate them into your schedule.

With lack of proper time management, a student will have trouble coping up with deadlines set by professors. Most students would tend to slack off during vacant hours that they end up accomplishing nothing.

If a student has prepared his or her own list of work for the day, he or she will be able to properly allocate the time spent for extra curricular activities and assignments.

Time Management at work

When it comes to your job, proper usage of your time is more particular. This is because you are paid for the hours of service you render to the firm. Hence, companies will try to ensure that each hour you spend at the office is utilized effectively for work. Despite of this, employees still seek out ways to have a break.

If time is not properly managed, employees could easily eat up more time for their “breaks” than what is actually spend on actual work. Hence, the company ends up requiring the employee to do overtime work just to finish a project. If the overtime rendered is reflected on your paycheck, then good for you. But if not, then you reap the unpleasant effects of poor time management.

The Essence of Time Management

With the varying scenarios presented, it all comes down to one thing – proper time management. It allows you to achieve more in less time as compared to doing things without following a suitable system.

By properly allocating your time, you will be able to finish your tasks much faster. Also, you are able to avoid overlapping tasks that tend to slow you down.

How is efficiency linked to proper time management? Listing your intended work for the day is more than just there for reminder. Instead, they also remind you in terms of importance and urgency. When you make a list, it is important that you also create a time table for each corresponding task. This way, you are compelled to follow them in the time frame that was indicated to increase efficiency.

Aside from becoming more efficient, you also become more responsible when you learn how to properly manage your time. You can not only set your priorities, but also provide equal time for both work and leisure. Being responsible with your time will work effectively whether in school or work.

Probably the biggest benefit you can get from proper time management is that it improves the quality of your work. When you have ample time to work on a certain task, you will have enough time to determine any mistake and have enough time to correct or improve on it. When you are cramming, you do not have this luxury of revision and hence mostly settle for what you can accomplish under the allowed time frame.

To those who fail to manage their time well, most of them work under pressure or hours before the deadline. Hence, they do not get the chance to check the quality of their work.

What is a Brand?

Branding your business is an essential step that any business owner need to take, whether yours is a small home business or big business. In fact, it is something that must be looked into during the phase of business planning.

A brand is basically a name or a logo that will be used in advertising campaigns to represent your company or business. This will be used when printing out your business cards or when referring to your company. Hence, deciding on a brand must be undertaken with much consideration and thought. To sum it up, a brand details who you are, what you do, and how you do it.

Importance of Branding

There are several aspects that involve branding businesses. Each has its own importance and impact on attaining your business  goals. This is a step that every beginning businessman needs to educate him or herself about because it will determine the company’s performance in the future.

Here are reasons as to why business branding must be given careful thought:

Creating Business Identity

When you use a business idea to start your own business venture, chances are there are already some other existing businesses with the same nature as yours. Therefore, you need to create a brand for your business that will differentiate you from your competitors.

So when deciding on a brand name or logo for your company, you need to think of creative ways that will help make your business be easily remembered by potential customers. Distinction is a vital part of every business venture and when people find that you have something unique to offer that lets you stand out from competing businesses, then you are one step closer to your business goals.

Once you have created your company brand, then that is when you need to look into delivering quality product or service that your brand will be perceived as. That takes you now to the next essential aspect involved with branding, which is marketing.

Marketing and Advertising Campaign

Branding also impacts the sales force of your product. If you are able to create a brand name that people will easily remember and recognize for your outstanding products, then it helps create an efficient branding system for your company.

The first step for a successful business is taking the time to let people know who you are, what you do, and the means at which you do it. Properly communicating your company’s vision through your brand is an essential stage of any business branding effort. Having established an effective company brand will also create awareness of the product you are promoting.

So, when people hear your brand, then they would easily think of your products or services and your company’s reputation.

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Before discussing about the integration of Lean Thinking Management tools with Six Sigma, lets discuss in brief about the two.

What is lean Management

Lean is an evolution of waste elimination and process streamlining techniques that were founded in the Just-In-Time, Toyota Production System, 5S, Focused Factory, TOC and Visual Workplace concepts and applications from as far back as the early 1950’s. One of the mottos of Lean is to only do “what is needed, when it’s needed, in exactly the right quantities, with a minimum amount of resources”.

The core idea of Lean management is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with less resources. Businesses and Leaders in all Industries and services including healthcare and government today are finding ways to apply the principles of lean as a means of producing goods and delivering services that creates value for the customer with the minimum amount of waste and the maximum degree of quality. Many organizations choose not to use the word lean, but to label what they do as their own system, such as the Toyota Production System or the Danaher Business System. Lean Management is applicable for every business and every process as it is not a tactic or a cost reduction programme but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organization.

What is Six Sigma

Six Sigma is one of the most powerful business improvement approaches to evolve in the last decade. Six Sigma is both a business improvement program AND a powerful set of statistically based improvement tools. It is a business management strategy, originally developed by Motorola, that today enjoys widespread application in many sectors of industry. Six Sigma seeks to identify and remove the causes of defects and errors in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization (”Green Belts, Black Belts” etc.) who are experts in these methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (cost reduction or profit increase).

Reason for Integration

There exist no single system or technique, which is self-sustainable and can be applied alone for the targeted results. Every system has its own merits and demerits. The Lean thinking has its weakness for strategic and operation business needs, sub-optimal application with quick-hit kaizen-type approaches, inadequate substantiation of bottom-line expectations and validation of financial impact, and poor ability to resolve critical variation and defect generating bottlenecks in the process. Although Six Sigma has been proven highly successful in many industries and functional applications, one of the critical weaknesses is the lack of a fundamental methodology for leveraging strategic and operational opportunities to drive the selection and execution of high priority projects.

Integration of Lean Management with Six Sigma

The integration of Lean management tools and Six Sigma produces a synergy that can work wonders for many companies. Companies experienced in the application of Lean and Six Sigma techniques have for some time recognized the compatibility and power of combining these approaches under the umbrella of a single business improvement program. There is a natural linkage between Lean and Six Sigma both at the program-level as well as the project execution level

Some of the tools and principals of Lean marketing can safely be introduced with the Six Sigma Framework.

1. Cause-and-Effect Diagram or Ishikawa and 5 Whys: When the concrete statistical data is not available in the Analyze phase of the Six Sigma, it becomes difficult to identify the root causes of the problem. In such a scenario applying 5 whys of Lean thinking in conjunction with the cause and effect diagram can make the job easier. It is a visual tool to logically organize possible causes of a problem area to the root cause
2. Value Stream Mapping: During the Analyze phase, a value stream mapping map helps categorize value enabling, value adding and non-value adding activities. The introduction of value mapping helps in identifying and eliminating the non-value added activities in each process, thus leading to the reduction in the waiting period between consecutive steps wherever possible. It can also be made a part of Kaizen Cycle that is included in the Analyze and Improve phase.
3. Takt Time: The German word “Takt” meaning ‘beat’. It refers to the time in which a project is completed to the fulfillment of customers’ demand. In the Analyze phase, the cycle times can also be taken into account for comparing it with the current SLAs (Service Legal Agreements). A tolerance level can be set and in case of exceeding tolerance levels, process improvements should be imitated for matching the cycle time with the takt time.
4. Heijunka Or Load Balancing: The load Balancing System of production design is used for getting a more consistent and even flow of process work. In the Design phase, the principle can be used in the Analyze phase to eliminate the bottlenecks that may have been identified during the Analyze phase.
5. Mistake-Proofing or Poka Yoke: The Japanese phrase “Poka Yoke” means mistake proofing. The process is useful when creating a new system with DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify) using Six Sigma Technique The Pareto analysis and Ishikawa chart bring out the problems of the current process. During the Improve and Design phases, different ways for elimination of errors can be investigated and the process improved or redesigned in its entirety

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