Since March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced companies to adopt new work modalities that, although they had already been adopted in some companies, many had not started down this path and have been forced to do so. The pandemic has highlighted something that is evident and that is that flexible work options allow a greater reconciliation of personal and work life, not offering this benefit puts you behind the satisfaction of your employees, the main asset of a company , whatever they say. Due to the principles on which agile project management methodologies are based, these are the ones that clearly best fit the new way of working.
These methodologies are centered on people and on the responsibility that the individual has in carrying out their work. But why do many employees feel that it doesn’t work? Why do you have the impression that agile methodologies add work and not efficiency? Why do you say that working from home “puts in more hours”? Not addressing these questions can lead a company to fail in something so important such as increasing the satisfaction of its employees and reaching higher levels of efficiency.

Let’s get to the bottom of the matter and see how agile methodologies really, according to their founding principles, improve time management and make task execution more efficient.
Because agility is nothing more than thinking critically and applying common sense to task management, it cannot be any other way than by doing things judiciously, we gain efficiency in managing our time. These are the principles of thought that, when applied, make us masters of our time:

Visualizing the work, in fact, Kanban, a methodology proposed by Toyota in the middle of the last century to gain agility in the manufacture of cars, means Visual (Kan) Card (Ban).
⦁ All tasks must be listed and described with the highest level of detail, more detail the closer it is to the time to undertake the task.
⦁ Visualizing the work allows you to prioritize the most urgent tasks, it also allows you to select those that can be done with less effort, and even discard those that are no longer necessary over time.
⦁ Working as a team, visualizing the work allows you to identify stuck tasks, dependencies on other tasks, blockages, and inefficiencies.
⦁ In project management, the fact that everything is described in one place eliminates unnecessary meetings, emails, calls.
When we select the task that we are going to carry out, it has to be 100% defined, we must be able to carry it out completely, from start to finish, without any ambiguities. Once we begin to do it, external problems will appear that will make us waste time trying to solve them, preventing us from focusing on things that are defined. An illustrative example; We want to issue a university degree. How many things should we know before going to the administration?
⦁ Do you request an appointment?
⦁ What are the hours?
⦁ Is there payment of fees?
⦁ Do I have all the documents I need?, receipt, passport photo, ID…
Not doing the previous work of detailing the task could lead to a wasted trip to the university with the waste of time that would entail.
We select to perform a single task, and we start the next one when the previous one is finished. Having many tasks in progress decreases efficiency. Starting many tasks but not finishing any is a problem, was the task clear? It was important?
The brain works much better focused on a single thing, in fact, it is highly recommended that when we are focused on a single task, we do not attend to the mobile or the mail, that we focus 100% on doing them. After a distraction, it takes minutes for the brain to regain full concentration again.
Allowing the brain to focus in such a way as to allow it to enter a trance state, or what Mihaly csikszentmihalyi calls “the flow state,” is the time when it is most productive. So we don’t want to break the flow state by jumping from one task to another or getting distracted by external elements.
Loving what we do is perhaps the greatest indicator of productivity, if we hate what we do, we will never gain agility and procrastination will be constant. Loving, or finding satisfaction in what we do, we will enter a flow state more easily, it could even be formulated, on the contrary, happiness is achieved when you flow, as writers, painters, programmers do…
Things are done right the first time. When we do something, let’s not think that we will improve it later because we will never do it of our own free will, that poorly done job will return to us in a constant problem-solving format. When we start with something we have to dry it perfectly the first time, many people.

Focus on value. Do not execute any task that does not add value, every time we think of a new task it should bring me closer to the goal, otherwise we must remove it from the “to do” list. This can even be extrapolated to personal life, not doing anything that does not add value to my person. Smoking, social networks, junk television, consumption of unnecessary time or even harmful to health.

Working iteratively (“Lean”), the value must be put to the test before the world as soon as possible. This concept is widely used in start-ups. We want to do what is most valuable in a company and put it to the test in the market so as to receive feedback from our customers as soon as possible. Not testing our work can waste a lot of time thinking about how the person who owns the product wanted things. A presentation to a boss, an application for a start-up, a company logo, etc.

If you want to manage your time well, EMPOWER YOURSELF. Be an adult, make your own decisions, take responsibility for your tasks, they don’t belong to anyone else. If you’re in a job that doesn’t treat you like an adult, consider changing it. Be responsible for the quality of your work, it is yours and no one else’s fault if it is not of sufficient quality. Choose your task and select it freely, that nobody imposes it on you. Jorge Bucay said, “never do anything you don’t want to do, you can always apply it, the worst that can happen to you is to die.”