Control start tasks using Twitter

Twitter is used by many to tell the public about current events. Stars, politicians and ordinary people write there every day (hour, minute - who is like) to show everyone their activity. Twitter is the most powerful time management tool, which I will discuss in this article.

The format of microblogging is convenient because it does not take much time to publish a message. It can be sent absolutely anytime and anywhere - from a website, computer, netbook, cellular. And, most importantly, it does not require special knowledge, that is, a low user logon threshold. Currently, Twitter has not even been translated into Russian, which does not stop Russian-speaking users at all. Psychologically, the reflection of their activity in writing helps in the implementation of plans. This is a confirmation of the basic idea of ​​the ISO 9000 standard - “write what you do and do what you write.” The same idea is pursued by the GTD time management methodology - Get things done . Anything from a notebook and pen to programs on a cell phone can serve as a tool for describing your plans. Twitter here may well act as such a tool. Of course, there are drawbacks, for example, there are no notifications about the occurrence of events and the calendar. But Twitter was not created for that.

Twitter can be viewed not only as a personal tool, but also as a collective one. At the enterprises very often there is a problem of the notification of employees about these or other events. On the other hand, the manager wants to know what his subordinates are doing at the moment, Twitter can help with this. In large corporate systems (for example, Alfresco ) there is already such a thing as “status”. But there is no such important aspect as the status history. That is, the manager (or colleague) sees what the employee is doing at the moment, but cannot in any way see what he was doing before.
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If we consider the link chief-subordinate, then the chief must always be aware of the workload of his wards and balance the load so that the resources are not idle on the one hand and were moderately loaded on the other. The chief gives commands to his subordinates, but it is not always the case that the subordinate immediately starts to carry them out. Usually there is a certain pool of tasks, having formed which and having set priorities the leader continues to be engaged in the work. At the same time, the head in full confidence that his subordinates perform exactly those tasks from the pool and precisely in the sequence in which it was planned. This confidence cannot be bolstered by nothing if there is no tool to control the start of tasks.

Usually, managers use the following types of controls:

1) day
2) weekly
3) monthly
4) quarterly
5) one year

Each level of control is included in the next, for example, monthly reports can be generated from weekly and daily, without losing data. That is, the monthly reports can not appear figures that were not in the day.

If you introduce intraday monitoring, then work efficiency will increase significantly. Introducing intraday control start tasks, we have the following advantages:

1) the subordinate will always notify the head of the start of work in an unobtrusive manner. The manager may adjust the course of the project work even before the start of any task. For example, if an employee with a high degree of autonomy announced the beginning of work on a task that is not a very high priority at the moment, the manager may, even before resources are spent, redirect such an employee to a more important task.

2) it will be physically difficult for the subordinate to fake. Every move and every job is recorded in the registry. If something takes an unreasonably long time, it will arouse suspicion and question. If the status does not change suspiciously for a long time or does not change at all, then the employee does not work.

3) a sense of satisfaction from the completed task, written in his own hand. That is, the employee writes himself the beginning of the task and internally begins to be absorbed only by her, without being distracted by something else. The joy and self-esteem of the tasks performed allows us to solve the following with enthusiasm. Such a collection of completed tasks can generate healthy competition in the team - “whoever does the most” means the number of tasks completed per day will certainly increase.

4) gradual deliverance from parallel tasks, when an employee is often forced to disperse his attention in different areas of activity. Having declared a specific task, the employee will no longer be sprayed as before and will not start performing another task until he has completed the current one. Here, the employee as if promises himself to do the work, and this feeling moves the process in the desired vector. Parallelism blurs this vector, so employees who have many tasks at the same time most often have a very small percentage of completed tasks.