The 4 Ds of Time Management: Do, Defer, Delegate, and Delete

The concept of Time Management has always been surrounding people’s lives. It is often said that there are 4 Ds of Time Management which are also referred to as the 4 Ds of Productivity. These Ds are Do, Defer, Delegate, and Delete. Project Managers often feel like they are burdened with work which is why they find out certain ways for themselves to do effective Time Management. If a person’s decision-making process is fast, they can work fast too. But as a coin has two sides, not everyone can work fast. There are people who begin to feel stressed out due to workload which is why the concept of 4 Ds is there. Let us understand this concept first.  

The Concept of 4 Ds of Time Management 

DO – As the word suggests, as an initiator, you should start working on a task that takes lesser time to complete. Prioritize your work as per the need and then work on it. This way your workload will reduce and you will be able to manage your time too.  

DEFER – Defer means delay and according to this, you should pause a task that feels less important to you or you have enough days to complete the task. Rather work on the more important one and once it is done, consider working on the task that you paused earlier.  

DELEGATE – The word delegate means to distribute. Working on a task that will require lots of time can get easier for you only if you delegate the same to your team members. This way you can get a chance to make better communication with your team members and less time will be consumed.  

DELETE – Being familiar with the word delete, it says that you must delete all the unnecessary tasks from your list. Paying attention to those tasks which are not important to complete is just a waste of time. Rather skip those tasks and move on further to the ones that require more time and utter attention. 

How to use the 4 Ds in your Everyday Routine?  

There is a proper way of following up on the 4 Ds that you just read above. The best way that will help in implementing these in everyday routine is using a Task Management Tool. Speaking of a precise tool, 1ViewTask will be the best suitable for you. This AI/ML-enabled tool comprises some amazing features that will help you in the finest Time Management and will help you increase your productivity by at least 30%.  

Once you are signed up on this tool, you can create tasks for yourself or your team members. Whilst you create a task, you can give a description to it, and prioritize the task as per its need which justifies the first D, DO out of the four. This way you can complete the tasks as per their urgency and you get to track the time taken to complete a particular task. You can check the time you took and manage the time accordingly. There are so many users who have improved their productivity just by doing daily task creation.  

Moving on further, this tool helps you to create multiple tasks at once and you can view all of them in a form of a list that will display on your home page. When you are working on a task, you can drag it and put it into the in-progress bar and if you want to pause working on that task, you can drag it and put it back into the to-do list. This way the second D, DEFER is justified. This will help you save time and you can resume working on the task once the other one is completed.  

Talking about the third D, DELEGATE. 1ViewTask is an advanced tool using which you can distribute a task/project easily with your team members. You can choose an assignee and a reviewer. This will help you to complete the work faster and ample time will be saved. Easy and better time management can be done by you and your team members as a user of this tool.  

Lastly, the very last D, DELETE is the one that can also be applied using 1ViewTask. If you have a list of tasks ready and you feel like some of the tasks are useless and of no use, you can reduce your workload and save some time by deleting them from the list. This way you can get relief from stress and the saved time can be used to work on something more important.  

CONCLUSION 

From the above-stated information, it can be concluded that if you use a time management tool like 1ViewTask, you can do better in your everyday routine. Using the 4 Ds can become a lot easier for you because you now know the right technique to use these terms. Creating tasks with the help of 1ViewTask and applying the Maker Checker concept makes things easier. In this concept, you can select a person who will be referred to as an assignee, this person will complete the given task and as for a checker, you can select a person as a reviewer who will make sure that the work is done on time.  Moreover, apart from the feature of task creation, this tool allows you to generate daily time reports, using which you can see how much time you are consuming in completing your work. you get to generate full-fledged Excel sheet reports that will help you check your overall productivity. There are different kinds of views in which you can view your report. As an admin, you can also add some guest users to your 1ViewTask portal. Lastly, you will receive daily notifications on your mobile via email regarding your tasks for the day, this will help you meet the deadlines too. Overall, this tool is made for you if you want to get better with time and task management. So, Signup now and take a hold of all these amazing features as soon as possible.

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