In Practice
Effective Time Management
By Peter Wildblood
Mar 22, 2004 - 4:17:00 PM

There is a perception that many managers are "crisis managers". They work on the "squeaky door syndrome"; the door that squeaks the loudest gets the most attention. Thus, priority setting becomes wholly crisis driven, with no real "control" in the hands of the manager. This somewhat dysfunctional process, when combined with the need to properly service "internal customers", their own staff, compounds the problem further.

The result is a downward spiral with reduced customer satisfaction and a real potential for risk, not to mention loss of personal and professional satisfaction through increased stress.

Throughout all this, real productivity, the proportion of their day that is directed toward significant outcomes, tends to slip!

However, you can improve this proportion of truly effective time as a percentage of time on-the-job by tapping into a natural human resource - yourself!

A simple fifteen minute planning exercise will substantially increase your effective time.

If you spend this fifteen minutes each day working out roughly what time you intend to spend on each major task, or group of tasks, effective time will increase by up to twenty percent.

The reason why so many managers are not organised to their advantage, is that they have their almost exclusive focus on the substantive issues of their management focus: finance/cash flow, products, suppliers, staff, publicity/advertising not to mention customers and service standards.

Therefore, what I suggest does not require a radical shift in your business practices to redress this imbalance.

ONE SMALL CHANGE is necessary; an investment of fifteen minutes. This will give you a two hour advantage in effective time.

My experience suggests that many managers are quick to eschew much thought of organisation in their personal work flow.

This is why I suggest this slight change, one which will have a huge impact on your effective time management.

As soon as you arrive in your workplace, or last thing at night, whichever is likely to work best for you, set aside fifteen minutes for the following exercise.

• Decide what issues you want to address and put those files (papers) and those files only on your desk for the next day. There are a number of techniques available to ensure that this occurs. The one I favour is a personal re-submission system. This will mean that at the end of the day your desk is free of files. Everything is in its place and nothing can be overlooked. This will take a little more change and a lot of commitment.
  
  A word of caution: Decide your daily commitment schedule keeping in mind that you will be interrupted during the day. APlan@ for these interruptions. Do not try to "account" for your whole working day with the files you select. Under commitment leads to over achievement!
  
  
• Divide the papers into two categories
  1. Those on which you might have to spend some significant time, say, a quarter hour or more.
  2. Those which require cursory attention
     
     
• Decide the order in which you will address the category (A) files. Leave the most intellectually stimulating, and interesting, to last. This will have a strong motivating effect on productivity.
  
  
• Decide how much time you will spend on each file in category (A). Do this quickly and intuitively. You already have enough experience to know roughly how much time, or the appropriate "band-width" of time, you will want to spend on a file. Do not allow accuracy to get in the way of this exercise. It is not an accountable procedure!
  
  
• Work quickly through the category (B) files and then proceed in priority order to address category (A) files.

Most managers have some general idea about what they want to achieve each day. A small number even work out carefully what files they will work on. Very few set targets for the amount of time they spend on each.

It is this last few who have the key to high percentages of effective time against time spent in the office. They also learn that customer, and staff, satisfaction improves along with their effective time! Personal and professional life is less stressful too!

Managers are high performance people and, by and large, they are reasonably well organised. They could not be otherwise. They are also highly focussed and committed people.

Their focus is about the technical needs of the management task at hand. Their focus on their work and personal organisation is often secondary. Those with a highly developed sense of organisation do so without really knowing why they do what they do to back up their managerial focus.

The majority of managers, without a highly developed sense of organisation, pick up sufficient organisational skills to "survive", however that survival expresses itself.

This can lead to an atmosphere of "crisis management" which causes, in turn, high levels of personal stress and poor health in the long term. These are my observations based on many years working in management and as a seminar leader presenting in-house and public seminars for managers.

There is a natural drive that each of us has as human beings. This is the drive to do something we want to do, to work in ways that are important to us individually. Our level of achievement is directly related to the strength of our commitment to the outcome we have set for ourselves.

This is what takes us through the application necessary to become competent and more than competent managers. This is what drives us to become business and community leaders.

Sports people, top performance people generally, are strongly driven by a single goal. To the extent to which this domination is complete they become outstanding at their chosen goal; they may represent their country, become famous, or naturally assume leadership in their chosen area of activity.

Quite literally, the message for goal-driven men and women is that, "what you want to achieve, you will achieve ... provided you are prepared to pay the cost, and opportunity cost, in training experience and skill development".

What this means for you as a busy manager with a strong general focus on achievement of business and personal goals is that some focus needs to be given to the personal organisational skills which underpin these outcomes. Without spending a small proportion of your day devoted to goals or outcomes about the organisation of your work, you will be less efficient in your work than you might otherwise be.

The results for you in spending a little time each day will be an improvement of up to twenty percent in what you achieve in the same time on the job each day. After a week or so of getting used to planning in this way, this will take no more than fifteen minutes daily to accomplish.

Peter writes regularly for professional and general magazines on management and leadership issues. His book, "Leading from Within: Creating Vision, Managing Change, Getting Results" was published by Allen & Unwin in 1995 and is now available direct from the author. http://www.management-training-consultants.com