What is "time management"

n. The management of time in order to make the most out of it.

Time management is the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency or productivity.

It is a meta-activity with the goal to maximize the overall benefit of a set of other activities within the boundary condition of a limited amount of time.

Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects, and goals complying with a due date. Initially, time management referred to just business or work activities, but eventually the term broadened to include personal activities as well. A time management system is a designed combination of processes, tools, techniques, and methods. Time management is usually a necessity in any project development as it determines the project completion time and scope.

The major themes arising from the literature on time management include the following:

• Creating an environment conducive to effectiveness
• Setting of priorities
• Carrying out activity around those priorities
• The related process of reduction of time spent on non-priorities
• Incentives to modify behavior to ensure compliance with time-related deadlines.

Time management has been considered to be a subset of different concepts such as:

• Project management: Time Management can be considered to be a project management subset and is more commonly known as project planning and project scheduling. Time Management has also been identified as one of the core functions identified in project management.
• Attention management: Attention Management relates to the management of cognitive resources, and in particular the time that humans allocate their mind (and organize the minds of their employees) to conduct some activities.

Organizational Time Management is the science of identifying, valuing and reducing wasted time within organizations. Organizational Time Management identifies, reports and financially values sustainable time, wasted time and productive time within an organization and develops the business case to convert wasted time into productive time through the funding of products, services, projects or initiatives at a positive return on investment.

Time management games are a subgenre of strategy video game focused around fast real time allocation of resources in a consequent order to fulfill the level objectives. The player must react to the incoming requests that occur as they play and serve them in the most effective manner to get the greatest possible reward. They are usually limited in time, and their resources limit the speed at which they can serve the requests. As a game progresses, the player usually has a possibility to upgrade their available resources by spending the earned rewards.

Time management is a subgenre of casual games and Strategy video games. The genre is relatively young, and there are not many books on game design that mention it.