Different Ways to Approach Time Management (Part 3 of 4)

Resuming the series about how to structure your Time Management Techniques, let's see more about the high level aspects from these techniques with the third way to do it: Alternating Way.

Alternating Way

In the Alternating Way of doing activities, you'll try to focus on doing some set of activities to reach a "mid goal" that accomplishes some minor objective, but spawns new activities and tasks. It's like a hybrid with the Convergent and Divergent Ways, Alternanting between them during your day.

This method is useful for people who work in various projects at the same time with a team, because there are some situations where it's useful to be concentrated in a subset of activities to complete a "mid goal" to delegate the next activites to another team member while you focus on another project (possibly with another team).

Another interesting use is to do some parallel activities to reach short-term objectives along the day, like checking and keeping up with your e-mail, where you could wait until some e-mail's are in your inbox to read and answer them in batch instead of interrupting your focus or concentration in every e-mail received.

Pros:

• You can get the better from the Convergent and Divergent worlds.
• Allows you to have a somewhat quick response to an interruption than using the Divergent Way.
• You don't get easily bored since you're changing methods in your day.

Cons:

• You can get confused when alternating between the Convergent and Divergent Ways.
• In some situations, like in short deadlines, this method creates a considerable time overhead.
• You need to plan carefully the amount the time allocated for every group of activities.

That's it! In the next week I'll post about some considerations about using these three methods and wrap-up this topic!