“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”, said Benjamin Franklin. Time management is the need of the hour but people are too busy complaining about the shortness of time, they make the worst of it! The students of EEE department attended a short & sweet lecture on ‘Time Management’ on the 21st of this month. It was timed, brief and enlightening, the lecturer being Umamaheswari ma’am.
Dr. B. Umamaheswari, Chairman of Department of Electrical Engineering, has been a pillar of support over the years completing various projects and adding numerous achievements to her name. Beloved professor and student-friendly, her inquisition to knowledge has led to clarion vision on concepts. She always encourages students to be research oriented and repeats, what we learn constitutes 10%, and the remaining 90% is practical applications. Applying the concepts and making it a reality is the cornerstone which is emphasised on, every time it is possible. 
The lecture started with the mention of Parkinson’s law, the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Then the students were assigned a task, to quickly scribble down a list of activities lined up for the upcoming week. Students started to scramble for a notebook and this felt like the first task that filled up the time available for the lecture. Though we were quick to catch onto a piece of paper and glued back to the adrenaline rush, after so many months did we feel like being asked a question for which we had an idea to answer. No matter how subjective, it is in us to think for a while before we pen it down. Our quizzical expressions, hinted ma’am that we haven’t got a clear cut answer. Her funny take on it, mentioning, ‘You mention being busy all the time but have nothing to jot down?’. We then started listing down, from chores to that week specific activity. A couple of people listed it on board, and with a few suggestions on how to list activities, she kept check on time.
With hardly 10 minutes left for the 25 minutes session, ma’am helped us categorize our list of activities into 4 D’s viz. Dump, Delay, Delegate & Do! Dump, self-explanatory; are tasks that require no thinking and hardly any time. Tasks under this category are evidently not important and should strictly be avoided. Delay, tasks that need to be thought about, are important but not urgent. Delegate, tasks that are not important but urgent, things that we can delegate to someone else.
Do, are tasks that are urgent and important. Ideally, tasks should fall under the ‘Delay’ category and we shouldn’t procrastinate them to the ‘Do’ category. Once tasks fall into ‘Do’ category life gets clumsy to handle. At this very moment, we must concentrate on things that fall under our ‘Do’ category and make sure we don’t let anything fall under this category and clear it at the earliest. We should manage our time or it will manage us.
The lecture was concluded with ma’am asking us to make note of Parkinson’s Law, repeating the words, “Work expands to fill time”.
