Can anybody catch a handful of time?

When I began to look into the aspect of systematic nature and being organized as part of my continued learning and research for leadership, management, and performance improvement, I discovered that there is a lot to learn in the pivotal area of organization. This is the second installment in the “Values of organization” series. The first article was titled “Do you file & plan or pile & scramble”. This time we will be looking at another aspect of being organized – time management.

The field of time management had actually taken on a life of its own for some time in the 80’s and 90’s as a way to get more productivity out of a given amount of hours. It is related to being organized and systematic because the methods help systematic individuals to actually create a plan and then follow through on it. Here is what my research into this part of being organized brought to light:

Time management is commonly defined as the management of time in order to make the most out of it. In a 2001 interview, David Allen observed: “You can’t manage time, it just is. So “time management” is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time, and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do”.

Time management can refer to all of the practices that individuals follow to make better use of their time, but such a definition could range to cover such diverse areas as the selection and use of personal electronic devices, time and motion study, self-awareness, and indeed a great deal of self-help. As narrowly defined, it refers to principles and systems that individuals use to make conscious decisions about the activities that occupy their time.

The label “time management” cannot predate the widespread use of the word “management” in our sense at the beginning of the 20th century. Popular self-help books on the subject were published around the same time (Arnold Bennett and Orison Swett). Concerns about the wise use of time have a longer history, reflected in the large number of proverbs concerning time and its utilization, dating at least to Classical Greece and to the Old Testament and other wisdom literature.For many years management texts did not emphasize the personal productivity of the manager.

Many popular management texts had no explicit material on time management or personal productivity management. When it was covered, the coverage was brief and often linked with stress management, which actually makes sense, as lack of time management, as we understand the term today, can easily lead to stress and anxiety. We have seen indications that a reduced level of systematic scoring in the performance assessment, especially when the score is relatede to the time management issue, is combined with raied levels of anxiety and stress indicators.

Time management strategies are often associated with the recommendation to set goals. These goals are recorded and may be broken down into a project, an action plan, or a simple task list. For individual tasks or for goals, an importance rating may be established, deadlines may be set, and priorities assigned. This process results in a plan with a task list or a schedule or calendar of activities. Authors may recommend a daily, weekly, monthly or other planning periods, usually fixed, but sometimes variable. Tools to support these activities are plentyful and begin with calendaring in Microsoft Outlook, Client Management Systems like ACT, but can go as far as detailed customized versions of special software.

On the business level the most complex solutions have been developed for large scale project management, applying many of the same aspects of goal setitng, task development, and task assignment with priorities and budgets.Different planning periods may be associated with different scope of planning or review. Authors may or may not emphasized reviews of performance against plans. Routine and recurring tasks may or may not be integrated into the time management plan and, if integrated, the integration can be accomplished in various ways. In reality, all these processes should be called time allocation methods, often associated with the goal of productivity improvement and capacity management.

A completely different approach, which argues against prioritizing altogether, was put forward by British author Mark Forster in his book “Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management”. This approach is based on the idea of operating “closed” to-do lists, instead of the traditional “open” to-do list. He argues that the traditional never-ending to-do lists virtually guarantees that some of your work will be left undone. His approach advocates getting all your work done, every day, and if you are unable to achieve it helps you diagnose where you are going wrong and what needs to change.

This revelation goes along with new research about New Years resolutions. They can turn into a pattern of disappointment, especially if ambitious resolutions weren’t achieved over and over again. In the larger business sense, this also relates to the teachings of John Kotter about establishing lasting change in organizations. Only if you follow a plan and all the associated steps,(eight in Kotters system) can you expect to get to a point where the new process will be called the way the organization has always done things – after about 3-5 years. 

People with the clustered approach of thinking have a harder time to apply many of the suggestions in time management. Still, just because things arer not sequential doesn’t mean each of the clusters wouldn’t benefit from prioritizing and time management.  Like with many of these aspects, attributes and revelations, gaining awareness is more than 50% of the solution. Combined with other teachings about the nature of performance, you can vastly improve your achiement of goals, success, and overall happiness. 

Axel Meierhoefer, President AMC LLC