Time Management for Team Leaders, CEO's, and Top
Managers
Year by year,
time management issues are attracting the
attention of more and more top and mid-level
managers. The reason for that is simple: Any
knowledge-based business must highly value its
specialists, whose time becomes the company’s
most valuable resource. How to organize the use
of that time most effectively for your company?
How to make time management part of your
corporate culture?
For your company
to adopt a time management culture, it
must take the following initial steps:
- Both
managers and employees must recognize the
need to improve their personal efficiency;
- Managers
and employees must understand that time
management techniques can help them improve
their efficiency;
- Time
management tools must be introduced to
everyone and implemented step-by-step as
part of the business process.
Surely, steps two and three are interconnected
and interdependent: It’s impossible to
understand whether a technique can help you
solve your time-shortage problem unless you try
it. So I’ll tell you about some simple, handy
tools that can almost immediately improve your
time management issues.
Planning Your Workday.
Before starting your workday, spend some 10
minutes on planning it. First, select so-called
“rigid” tasks in your plan. These are the tasks
that must be done at a predefined time (for
example, meeting with someone). Make sure that
consecutive rigid tasks are separated from each
other by some time interval. Why? That’s because
your partner or client may be late for your
meeting, it may take longer than expected, and
the delay may result in having to postpone other
tasks; as a result, you might become nervous,
and so on.
For the same reason, I recommend not to tie
“flexible” tasks to a specific time but to enter
them onto a separate list. Keep in mind that
such tasks are optional or of low priority. It
doesn’t matter whether you complete them at
10:00 a.m. or at 12:30 p.m. You can do such
tasks when you don’t have any rigid tasks.
Always prioritize flexible tasks, or you may
miss more important ones. So list the tasks that
you must do and select the high-priority ones,
to start with.
Another important thing when planning your day
is to “budget” time for major, time-consuming
tasks. For example, you need two hours to
prepare a report. As soon as you begin working
on it, your colleagues start to distract you
from doing it for more or less important
reasons. As a result, it takes you 4 hours 30
minutes to complete the report! You may be
surprised: “Why? I’ve spent only 4 times 15
minutes, or one hour in total, on other things.
That means I was to complete my report in 3
hours! Sorry, such math doesn’t work here. You
need to take into account not only the time you
spend on other things, but also how long it
takes you to get back to your normal working
condition, which existed just before you were
distracted. That’s why you should assign enough
time to “budgeted” tasks, to be used for them
exclusively. Don’t answer your phone, if that’s
possible.
If you have a personal assistant, that would be
rather easy. But what to do if you can’t fence
off external distractions? Of course, you can
switch on your answering machine and stay away
from your phone, but it’s useless to start
saying to everybody that you’re busy right now —
simply because you “switched over” from your
task to them anyway! There is an excellent
technique, called “red flag,” for fighting such
distractions. It has already become part of the
corporate culture related to time management,
which involves agreements between team members.
Just arrange it with your colleagues that they
shouldn’t bother you if they see a little red
flag (postcard, badge, whatever) on your desk.
Surely, the conditions of such limitation must
be specified. For instance, you may be allowed
to use your little red flag only once a day, and
for only two hours. Simple and effective, isn’t
it?
Let’s get back to planning your workday, shall
we? The main principle says that you must plan
the use of at most 60 to 70 percent of the
available working time. Otherwise your schedule
will be unfeasible simply because it leaves no
time for unplanned work and emergencies. Keep in
mind that it’s very important to provide for
every contingency so that you can respond to
anything calmly and effectively. That’s why you
need to keep aside the remaining 30 to 40
percent of your time. If all your business
processes are streamlined and you never face
emergencies, great! Just spend your “saved” time
on strategic tasks or personal development. For
example, read professional journals or industry
regulations.
Keeping Record of Your Work Hours.
Perhaps you feel totally exhausted at the end of
your workday (which may be about 10 p.m., or
maybe even later). If that is the case and you
don’t understand what you’ve spent your whole
day on, try keeping record of your work hours.
That is, start taking notes of what and when
you’re doing. At the end of each day, analyze
the results and reveal the distractions in your
work, so-called “time consumers.” These are any
things that consume more of your time than you’d
like them to: telephone conversations, business
meetings, email, and so on.
A typical technique of fighting time consumers
is combining your work into blocks and
allocating only a limited time for routine
things. For example, spend one hour twice a day
on reading emails and replying to them. For the
rest of the day, just switch off your incoming
email notification. Or make a “series” of phone
calls. Or focus on preparing to a forthcoming
business conference (a “budgeted” task). Make
sure that no activities are duplicated. For that
purpose, company meetings, business talks, and
conferences must be attended by all key persons;
and discussions and decisions must be minuted
and followed up.
An important time reserve, which mustn’t be
disregarded in view of today’s transportation
issues, is waiting time. We are often spending
our time in traffic jams, at the airport, at the
railway station, and so on. Why not use that
time for making phone calls, reading audio
books, or recording your thoughts? For example,
you can use a dictaphone to record your ideas,
interesting solutions that you’ve noticed
somewhere (such as an original advertising board
or innovative office decoration), or assignments
for your subordinates. When you get to your
office desk, you can transfer your records to a
Word document for a more convenient use.
Managing Your Work Load.
Some bosses think that it’s good if their
subordinates stay late at work. Such supervisors
simply don’t understand that physical and mental
fatigue tends to accumulate. It can result in
low performance at work, or even in a disease.
The Japanese have already learned that lesson in
a hard way. They even coined a special term, “karoshi,”
which literally means “overworked to death.”
Let’s not repeat others’ grievous mistakes and
allocate some time to relaxation.
Keep in mind that having a rest from time to
time is a must. For instance, you can work for
55 minutes, and then relax for 5 minutes. During
these 5 minutes, forget about your work and
switch over to something else. If you were
typing a report, get up from your chair, stretch
your spine, walk up to the window, and do some
eye exercises. It’s even more effective to “get
out or the context.” For example, you can change
your environment for 10 minutes by getting out
of your office building and walking for half a
mile.
The Most Important Thing Is to Start.
Oftentimes, we put off the solution of a big,
difficult problem that can’t be solved at one
go. But it’s exactly this kind of problem that
must be “invested” in if you want to be
successful in your business, professional, or
personal development! Developing a new
communicative strategy, writing a thesis, or
learning a foreign language are typical cases.
Such a problem may be called an “elephant,”
because it’s so huge that you can’t “eat” it all
at once. How to make yourself start tackling
this kind of problem? How to continue solving
the problem and not to quit? The answer is
simple — cut the “elephant” into “chewable”
pieces! That is, break the problem down into
smaller portions, which can be added to your
daily schedule. For instance, if your “elephant”
is to learn a foreign language, then your
“steak” may be to talk for 15 minutes with a
native speaker; if it’s to write a thesis, keep
on writing one page a day. If you use this
approach, you will see soon that your “elephant”
is successfully getting smaller and smaller. If
you need to write a dissertation, diploma
thesis, or just an article, you may try using
the “Swiss cheese” method instead: Do your
project not in the logical order, but
arbitrarily, starting from “eating away” the
simplest and most delicious pieces here and
there. That is, start writing your paper at any
place, choosing the part that you already have a
good idea about. After “diving” into your work,
you’ll probably be surprised how easy it is to
write one big part, then another, and finally
complete your thesis or article!
Setting Goals.
Time management is a technique that helps you
use the most valuable, irreplaceable resource —
time — more efficiently, achieve your personal
goals, and realize yourself. Thus, time
management gets the strategic and even
philosophical meaning of managing your whole
life. Obviously, our goals define our
priorities, which, in their turn, influence our
plans. So as time management techniques let us
optimize the use of your time, people may ask
themselves: Why do I need that? Why do I need to
do more in less time? Why do I need to run
faster, and where am I running to? At this
point, the manager faces a very important
problem of matching the company’s interests with
each employee’s interests. If this problem is
solved successfully, great: By achieving their
personal goals, employees will ensure the
achievement of the company’s goals. And vice
versa, as the company achieves its goals, better
conditions can be created to help the employees
realize themselves and follow their own business
interests.
When talking about goals, it’s good to take a
look at your life from the viewpoint of your key
areas. These areas are your job, family, health,
recreation, hobbies, friends, and so on. Take a
piece of cardboard paper and write down your
goals for the next year with regard to each key
area. Try to make these goals as specific as
possible, and be sure to set deadlines for
achieving each of them. Put that piece of paper
into your diary or into your desk drawer that
you open every day so that it reminds you about
your strategic goals and helps you not to get
lost in daily routine. Keep in mind that
achieving each goal takes time!
See also:
Project Tracking
Software.
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