Tango! Managing Self and Leading Others

Subject Name: Tango! Managing Self and Leading Others (MM1051)

Name: LAI WING KI GIGI

Student ID: 17051939D

Tutorial Class: TUT002#, Tue 16:30-17:320

Tutor’s Name: CHEN Yuting, Cherry

A is a new friend I met in Polyu last year. Both of us are local student and have just transcended the hugest devil of Hong Kong students – DSE. She graduated from a band 2 Chinese secondary school and get a bare pass in DSE English. Hence, it is a bit difficult for her to adhere to the university life as the teaching environment here is full of English. Differing from secondary school teachers, tutors and lecturers in university will not repeat the same things again and again due to the tense teaching schedule, plus, they will not urge students to submit homework and attend every class. Therefore, if A does not check the notifications posted on the website regularly and skips lessons in usual, essay submission dates and crucial activity in class will be missed easily and her marks will be deducted eventually. That is one of the reason why she felt a bit confused in the first semester.

On the other hand, she is an active and vivacious person, enjoying group activities very much. Therefore, she wants to be a member of the department committee, organizing various events for students of her department. As interviewing, internal and open consulting are all the process of being the official department committee, she skipped lots of lessons to prepare and conduct the interview and consultation day. The situation has not alleviated until now because she has a lot of gathering with her committee members, and that is why she is far behind the learning progress at present.

For A’s habits, she has learnt cakes making for around 3 years and her dream is to open a cake shop in the future, providing a comfortable area for people living in fast-paced city to take rest and enjoy her hand made cakes as well as life. However, due to the tense study progress and busy duties of committee, she has no time to make cakes and participate in cooking class now. The less practice, the less improvement. It seems that she is stepping farther away from her dream and it is manifest that the hugest obstacle for her is time management.

Time management refers to managing time effectively, which means doing right things in appropriate time (Management Study Guide, n.d.). As time is limited and priceless, effective time management allows individual to make the best use of time by assigning specific time slots to activities according to their importance and emergency. Under consummate time management, A can be more organized and be able to plan things well and forecast possible difficulties, so that she can realize her goals step by step within the shortest possible time.

Practically, the key point of a successful time management is to understand the differentiation between urgent and important work. According to the Eisenhower Decision Matrix suggested by Stephen Covey (as cited in The Art of Manliness, 2013), “Urgent” means activity requiring immediate attention while “Important” refers to task having an outcome that leads us to achieve our goals. There are four quadrants explaining which activity we should spend more time in and prioritize first:

quadrant I - urgent and important tasks, it is typically including crises, problems, or deadlines. In A’s case, her assignment deadline is one of the concrete examples. In other words, schoolwork should be prioritized over committee duties and cooking lesson.

Quadrant II - not urgent but important tasks, it is mainly about boosting relationships, planning for the future, and improving oneself. Referring to A’s situation, having cake making classes should be classify in this area as it is highly relevant to her life goal, but being a committee is also beneficial as it can broaden her social circle. Both of them are vitally crucial, A therefore should take a balance between them instead of giving one up for the others.

Quadrant III - urgent but not important tasks, it usually refers to interruptions or request from others and the ultimate mission is to help them to meet their own goals. For instance, A always be invited to join committee gathering, sometime aims to discuss the event organizing but most of them are just social activities. Those are not necessary but A tend to attend all in usual. It shows that A usually conducts an activity without considering its value.