Article: Time management template

Time management template is a paper or electronic pattern matching specific needs of those who plan time. A good example is a student schedule that provides special structure to record timetable of lessons, extra-curricular activities and other arrangements. Various patterns and samples are used almost in every sphere of organized activities. There are simple personal time management templates for managing usual home tasks, and complex business templates for managing serious multi-level arrangements. Let’s consider some types of time management templates by their real-life application in business:

• Employee – this type is used for outlining duties and tasks of employees in terms of working/business time. This type includes classification by time planning scope: daily time management templates for creating worksheets in terms of day-to-day job, weekly time management templates for setting weekly plans and time shifts, and so on.

• Project – this type is used when you need to depict a project timeline, including milestones, project stages, activities etc. Usually, for this complex purpose special tree-like templates are used, however in order to depict project timeline of milestones and events calendar-like agenda is better.

Usual forms of time management templates:

• Matrix – it is a form when tasks are recorded on intersections of lines and columns representing certain values of task attributes. Classic example is when tasks are recorded between on the one hand “Important” and “Unimportant” as lines, and “Urgent”, “Not urgent” as columns on another hand, so tasks recorded on intersections are classified as “Urgent and Important”, or as “Urgent, but Unimportant” and so on. 
• Job sheet – this is a form that can be easily managed through some computer-based means like MS Excel time management template or anything like this. Actually this spreadsheet consists of lines and columns where lines represent tasks and columns – their attributes, like due dates, durations etc. 

• Chart – this form is a special empty grid that can be used for drawing up charts such as Line or Area diagrams showing fluctuation of some parameters along the time axis.
• Time management log template – this is a journal-like template that works for recording events as they happen. This template may have a column for recording date & time, and place to record events right opposite to this column, so records on time becomes attached to records about event. 
• Calendar – the most usual template used not only in business, but in our daily life. This type is popular because depiction of tasks on a time grid makes it easier to understand the flow of events, appointments and other expectations.

Software:

VIP Task Manager is easy-to-use teamwork scheduler for Windows, allowing you to manage business tasks and projects, to assign tasks to employees, to plan working time, schedules and control team performance in real-time regime. This program features three kinds of sharable time management templates – Task List, Task Tree and Calendar. This is not free time management template tool, but effective commercial groupware with time management template free trial version (30 days). Unlike time management template Excel solution, VIP Task Manager uses reliable client-server technology to manage the database.