Past to Present

Something just pop up to my mind about critical thinking and time management. Just want to share my experience and reflect on it.

I guess when you are doing your bachelor degree. You would try to put as many references as much as possible to make your work look credible. There would be some critical thinking in it but not so much, as you are just finding many sources to put all your work together. Time management, you kinda know when is your assignment due or when you are going to have an exam.

However, once you enter to real working life...all of these are really important. Critical thinking is very essential. When you need to offer your client a work, you need to understand their business, how we can apply our theory to their business, what are the implications, what are the alternatives and its advantages and disdvantages of each alternative. My senior used to say that we need to put on our client's shoes. I still think that I critical skill is not wide enough. Once you proposed your work to your boss and being able to listen to his perspective, you will be quite surprise that 'why i didn't think of that'. But I think that is something that come with an experience as well, if you have chance to interact with many clients and done so many projects, then you will have wider perspective.

Also with time management, you don't know how importmant it is until you have a lot of work that you think 24 hours is not enough. In university, you know kinda have exact timeline know when you gonna have what. But in working life, I think specially for consultant life, we do have exact timeline but the new project can coming in anytime. So you need to be able to prioritize your work very well (but sometimes you can't manage timeline very well as there will be some variation like mismatch schedule between us and client). And actually time management is something that I am still struggling with. Not sure that word 'NO' that Paul taught us in class can apply to my situation because I think all the works that my boss gave me are important but urgent or not is another thing. One time that I had too much work that someday I don't have time to sleep or slept for only few hours and rarely see my parents that is when I start to say 'No' because my don't think my body can handle it anymore and i think I want to have time with my parents as well.

I guess my reflection on these is that you wouldn't know how these skills are useful until you have a chance to really use it and apply it. I think this year would be a one tough year!!! as both skills are something that would have to improve on and something that I would like to be better at.

: 14 Oct 2014 23:58 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem