7

Time Management

7.1 Introduction

Time management will be surely one of the major challenges you will face when you transition from college to career. As seen in several chapters (such as Chapter 20, which discusses meetings), even time management takes on a whole different meaning at the workplace as compared to your college. Time management at work is not as simple as being prompt and punctual. Neither is it just equal to ‘not wasting one’s time’. It is much more complex due to the shift in the kinds of demands placed on your time by your job. Consequently, at work, you need to come up with very effective means to use and manage your time.

This chapter will walk you through some of the widely-used time management techniques that can prove valuable in your career. In Section 7.2, we will discuss the changes you should expect in the demands placed on your time when you move to a job. In Section 7.3, we will alert you to some tell-tale signs of time management problems that should swing you into corrective action. In Section 7.4, we will discuss a six-step approach to get your time management house in order. In Section 7.5, we will highlight some traps that are easy to fall prey to and explain how you can overcome these traps. Section 7.6 summarizes the key points of the entire chapter.

7.2 Transitions in Time Usage

There are four major transitions in the way your time is demanded and utilized when you move to a job from college. Figure 7.1 depicts these transitions.

In your college life, the only ‘work’ component was your studies. Granted, there were a plethora of assignments, projects, homework, tests and exams you had to face, but they were all homogeneous in the sense that they pertained only to the subjects that you studied in that semester. Additionally, all your deadlines were predictable and unchanging—midterm-exam dates, assignment-submission deadlines, final-exam dates and so on were all known beforehand and remained static. Your workload was by and large consistent during each semester. You might have lost time during one or more semesters because of procrastination or there were unforeseen circumstances to contend with. Your workload might have become uneven during the semester and peaked just before the exams. But you were the boss of your own time, having the free will to decide when and what to study. All these factors together meant that you really did not have to worry too much about time management.

But when you join a job, time takes a very different hue. First, you have to perform a variety of heterogeneous activities. There are meetings, conference calls, technical tasks, negotiations and a lot of other things to worry about; you also have to work on multiple initiatives and projects simultaneously. Your deadlines are no longer predictable and could change frequently. Suddenly, there may be a complaint from an angry customer that forces you to drop everything you are doing and switch to firefighting mode on a completely new task. Your workload also varies drastically from time to time, for example, you may have to work long hours during a crisis or to meet a deadline. Finally, you will find that you are not the only boss of your time—your boss, your customers and even your family may control your time more than you do. This may give rise to a feeling of being overwhelmed and helpless.

Added to all this, the ever-shrinking deadlines and near-impossible delivery dates arising out of a ‘get it done yesterday’ mindset can make you feel that you require more than 24 hours a day just to stay afloat.

We have to learn to take the bull by its horns and we will see how in this chapter. But first, let us discuss some symptoms to watch out for during your early days in a job. These symptoms can point to impending time management problems.

7.3 Symptoms of Time Management Problems

Time management problems do not suddenly crop up one fine (well, not so fine) morning. Like sediments on a river bed, they build up over time. It is up to you to nip these problems in the bud. If not handled effectively and immediately, time-related problems can soon sneak up and, sometimes, even destroy us. We give below two sets of questions that you can ask yourself to identify symptoms of time management problems.

Count the number of questions that you answer ‘yes’ in Snapshot 7.1 and ‘no’ in Snapshot 7.2. Add these two counts. The larger the sum, the higher the chance that you will encounter time management problems sooner than later. Let us now look at a six step procedure by which you can make your time management more effective.

7.4 ALPEDoT—A Six-Step Approach to Improving Time Management

The six-step approach to time management can be easily remembered by the acronym ALPEDoT:

Appreciation/Attitude

Listing

Prioritization

Estimation

Documentation

Tracking

Let us look into each of these in some detail:

Developing a positive attitude about time management: In our day-to-day life, time is almost never given the importance it deserves. When an electrician says he will come in the next 10 minutes, he might actually mean sometime in the next couple of hours. Likewise, when a service person says he will have your TV fixed in 2 days, he may mean sometime in the next couple of weeks. Most academics, corporate professionals and political leadership act as poor role models in time management. Thus, the first step in improving your time management skills is to develop an appreciation and a good attitude about time management. You should recognize that:

Time is money: Time is indeed a precious commodity; it indeed has monetary value. Just to get a notional idea of the value of time, consider ten employees with an average monthly salary of `1.5 lakhs per month. If one of them comes in 15 minutes late to a meeting, effectively 15 × 10 = 150 minutes are lost for the organization. This works out to approximately one-fourth of a day’s salary—which is close to a couple of thousand rupees! Mind you, this is just the cost of time directly lost. If you add to this the opportunity cost of what the employees could have done during the same time, then you get a picture of the true impact of the lost time in monetary terms.

Time is opportunity: Each day is different and with it comes different opportunities, possibilities and challenges. Today’s moments are its alone and there is no point missing today’s opportunities and lamenting about this later. Seeing opportunities—and using them fully and wisely—is an essential aspect of any time management scheme.

Time management is a social responsibility: You may not realize it but you do a lot of things each day in cooperation with other people. Your effective management of time has a domino effect on everyone else’s time and performance. It is like a relay race; if one runner gets delayed, everyone downstream (and the entire team) gets affected.

Because of all these and many more reasons, your first step is to develop a positive attitude about the importance of time management. Contrary to what many people think, time management does not mean being obsessive-compulsive about time—for example, waking up precisely at 5:25 a.m. and being fussy about eating lunch exactly at 1:00 p.m. each day. In fact, time management is not about an external clock timing our activities. It is about developing an internal rhythm, synchronizing this rhythm with the universal, external clock and, along the way, making a list of priorities and allocating time for everything in the order of importance. A good time management scheme will have enough self-regulating mechanisms to nudge you back on track if you stray from your original plans. Time management is a positive force that enables you to enjoy things without letting them get out of hand. It should not be thought of as a constraint.

Making a list of all the activities you need to do: Once you see the value of time and the importance of managing it, you need to put in place an active and consistent time management system.

Good time planning starts with making a comprehensive list of all the activities, chores, appointments, deadlines that demand your time and attention. The framework in Figure 7.2 can help you list the myriad activities that cry for your attention day in and day out.

To simplify planning, we have divided the activities into two categories: work-related and non-work-related. The first category includes activities that crop up every now and then, demanding your immediate attention—it may be your boss saying, ‘You put aside other things and get me this report in the next couple of hours’ or your child may have to be taken to a doctor because of sudden fever. (Although the second example is personal in nature, we have included it in the work-related category because it can have ramifications on your work.) Whenever these activities crop up, update your list of work-related activities. Of course, you will have your day-today activities, such as writing program code and posting expenses into ledgers. Medium-term activities, such as preparing for the visit of a foreign delegation next month, and the most important (but often ignored) long-term activities, such as training and self-development, should also be part of this list.

On the non-work-related front, you will need to allocate time for health and exercise, your family, social activities such as fulfilling some social responsibility, religious activities and, finally, leisure activities such as indulging in your favourite hobbies, taking a family vacation, etc.

When you put this all together in a list, you will be surprised by the number and variety of activities that you have to do. You will also quickly realize that you simply do not have the time to do them all. This will take you to the next step of prioritizing activities to arrive at a realistic calendar for yourself.

Prioritizing your activities: ‘Prioritizing’ in this context simply means doing the most appropriate activities at the most appropriate time. Obviously, this is a very open-ended statement. Let us structure this into more specific frameworks in this section.

Identify the activities that you absolutely have to get done by a specific period: This group of activities includes deliveries expected of you at work organizing the programs, putting in place quality-improvement steps, creating reports and so on. It also includes the supporting activities that you need to perform, such as attending meetings. Also, include in this group similar activities from your non-work front that are non-negotiable from the time perspective (e.g., the wedding of your brother). These are driven by deadlines that are usually tough to avoid. These are what Stephen Covey¹ calls ‘urgent’ activities.

Squeeze in time for things that you do not have to get done immediately but need to do anyway: There are always activities that you need to do, but never get around to doing because there is no one breathing down your neck to get them done. These are what Stephen Covey calls ‘important but not urgent’ activities. These include the skill enhancements you always planned to do, the 30 minutes of exercise that you promised yourself you would do every day and things like that. You will try to upgrade a skill ‘just when you need to’ and you will do the 30 minute exercise only when pushed by your doctor. The challenge is that we will all have a temptation to put off these important but not urgent activities until they become important and urgent. By that time, firefighting mode sets in and it becomes too late or too inefficient to start these activities. Figure 7.3 depicts an adaptation of Stephen Covey’s urgency-importance dimensions to time management.

Fig. 7.3 The urgency-importance dimensions of work

If you consider the time needed for all the activities in the ‘important’ category and add the sum to the time needed to finish the ‘urgent’ activities, you might find that you need to work 14 hours per day! A person with habitually poor time management skills will be stretched for time even more and may have to toil for long hours just on these categories. What can you do to avoid this?

One way to break from this shackle is to consciously allocate some time for the ‘important but not urgent’ activities. Initially, this may entail that you work extra hours to make time for the ‘important but not urgent’ activities. But, if you consciously set aside a certain time every week for such activities, you will be surprised at how much you can accomplish in the long run.

Identify tasks that you need not do during a time period: We can hear you asking, ‘How can I ever set time aside for anything except fire-fighting? After all, we live by deadlines and pressures all the time.’ To answer this, ask yourself, ‘Am I always spending time on things that are important and urgent?’ Alternatively, ask yourself the question, ‘Do I sometimes do things that I need not or should not do and, thereby, waste precious time?’ You will find that most likely your answer to the first question is a ‘no’ and the second question is a ‘yes’. Let us be more specific. Reflect on these questions:

• When a phone rings, don’t you feel tempted to take the call immediately, unless it is a call from some irate customer you want to avoid?
• Don’t you have the urge to check your email and text messages every few minutes?
• Don’t you push something that is actually low priority but gives you the kicks to do it and thus you push it up the priority list?
• Don’t you, every now and then, go Googling on a random walk to the no-man’s land of cyberspace?
• Don’t you tweet your friends about the delicious pasta in the new Italian joint down the road?

Most of you would answer ‘yes’ to the above questions, especially if you are fresh out of college. These activities can be viewed through a different set of classifications, as given in Figure 7.3. A lot of time management problems arise when one spends too much time on interesting but low-priority activities. Very few of us are lucky enough to find a perfect fit between what we like to do and what we need to do. Usually, we choose activities that we like to do. There is an inertia that forces us not to choose the activities that we don’t like to do, even if they need to be done. The approach then should obviously be to move from the quadrant of ‘like to do and do not have to do’ to ‘do not like to do but need to do’. This obviously requires the understanding that life always comes as a package and you cannot simply choose to do only ‘cool’ activities.

Estimating the time required for each of your activities: After you have classified and prioritized your activities, the next step is to estimate the time required for each activity. You will have to rely on your past personal experiences as well as on those of other relevant people in your environment. This step enables you to effectively slot these activities in your calendar.

You should have an idea of your ‘productivity rate’. How many lines of code can you write in 4 hours? How many transactions can you post in the ledger in a work day? What do you expect to accomplish—both qualitatively and quantitatively—in the schedule you have made for yourself?

Big corporations, mainly manufacturing houses, do what is called a ‘time study’ to come up with productivity numbers for individual employees and expect them to work at that rate. If you are asked to work more aggressively and you do not think it is possible, you should talk to your manager and ask for extra resources or time to complete your job.

Sometimes, you can use your time estimates for activities as parameters for prioritizing the activities. When we have a list of twenty things to do in a day, we take pride in completing as many activities as possible. In this case, picking out the shortest activities and completing them can give us a sense of satisfaction. Suppose you have a half-hour break in between meetings. You might not be able to use this time to do half of something that normally takes an hour to do. Instead, you can pick an activity that perhaps takes 20 minutes to complete. In this way, you can earn a 10-minute break as well.

But it is also important to ensure that we do not just pluck these apparently low-hanging fruits. Picking the shortest activities to do first may eventually lead to a backlog of the longer and, perhaps, more important activities.

You should also remember to use the time you have estimated for an activity only as a guideline. Expect that the activity may take plus or minus a few minutes off your estimate and budget it. Do not stop the activity midway because the time you allocated for it was up; you might have to spend more time picking up the threads and doing context-switching when you restart the activity later. If you are close enough to completing the activity, by all means try your best to complete it, keeping the impact on the other activities to a minimum. But do not go beyond a certain threshold because this can have a domino effect on the time allotted for your other activities. Beyond a certain limit, put this activity on hold and move on to the next activity.

Do not forget to make allowance for transition time between appointments. If one meeting ends at 10:30 a.m. and another meeting starts at 10:30 a.m., then surely you are going to be late for the second meeting even if this meeting is in the same venue. You should allow a few extra minutes in your schedule to migrate both physically and mentally from the first meeting to the second. If you have a say in the matter, do not schedule back to back meetings. If you are going out of town to attend a meeting, plan your travel time carefully by factoring in potential airport delays and traffic jams and allow extra time as a buffer. Good planners know that there are always time lags and lead times (lead time being the time between your ordering something and actually getting it) and are adept at figuring them out and incorporating them in their schedules. They are also cognizant of factors such as holidays, factory shutdowns and general strikes when making aggressive schedules.

Often, the dates and times of activities will be imposed on you by external sources and you will have to build the rest of your schedule around it. If you have a prior commitment and a new meeting time clashes with it, sort it out right in the beginning and ask to reschedule one of them so that both your commitments are taken care of. (In case of a tie, the prior commitment should have greater priority.) As a rule, do not overbook or crowd up your days, if you can help it.

When the week rolls in, stick to your timetable as much as possible, although you should not be inflexible. If there are urgent activities, make allowance for them and rejig your schedule later. Similarly, an originally scheduled task may get cancelled or postponed, freeing up a slab of time. Utilize it for some other activity. But do not get too sidetracked and derail the activities in the original schedule. If you are close to finishing a task and you are overshooting the clock a bit, by all means spend those few extra minutes and finish it. But beware of it dragging on and on and eating into your next engagement.

Documenting and sharing your schedule: After you have prioritized, estimated and allotted activities to time slots, it is important that you document all this. You can use a piece of paper or an electronic organizer to do this.

An important aspect of documenting a schedule is keeping others informed, especially when changes happen. Make sure that you communicate your vacation dates to concerned people in advance, especially your immediate manager so that they can factor this in and arrange for substitutes in your absence.

Tracking your schedule: Your schedule is a live document and changes as situations change. You should stay on top of all this and reschedule your appointments and commitments as necessary. Time management calls for your active involvement, and at every step, you need to track what your original plan was and what activity you actually ended up doing and make any needed adjustments. Remember that schedule changes, especially at the last moment, are inevitable in today’s world and will hit even the people who manage their time very effectively. Your success depends on your ability to handle such changes and still get things done, while keeping everyone informed.

7.5 Time Management—Bad Practices

Even if you are meticulous about time management, bad time habits can creep in. Some of these problems are not under your control, while some are. Let us look at some of these problems.

Tasks taking longer than scheduled: Schedule overruns and tasks taking longer than we had figured are by far the largest single reason why our time management goes for a toss. With experience, we will get better at predicting how long an activity may take and make more realistic schedules. But even then, factor in some time for the unknown, the unexpected and the unbelievable.

Interruptions: Disturbances and interruptions at work come in many forms—phone calls, your boss barging into your cube demanding something, your colleague desperately wanting some information or your friends simply stopping by to say hello. Not only is time wasted but such disturbances also disrupt the rhythm and flow you had built up until they walked in. So, keep your engagement with the interrupters to a minimum. Remember, you do not have to be very social when you are in the middle of something important.

Meetings/appointments getting cancelled: If you have scheduled a meeting with someone—and the other party is a no-show—consider it canceled after a reasonable wait period, especially if the other person has not called you to explain his/ her delay. But if you have a lot at stake in this meeting, it is your responsibility to somehow contact them and reschedule the appointment, even if you are annoyed by their behaviour.

Improper closures: When you finish an activity on time but the other party thinks there are still some loose ends, you will mark that activity as officially ‘done’. But you will still keep working on it unofficially until you resolve all pending ‘open’ issues and bring it to a complete closure. Imperfect closing of an activity can become a major drain on your time if not taken care of properly.

Ineffective multitasking: Trying to do multiple things at the same time may give you the impression that you are using time efficiently. But given how much concentration is required for each task that we do, you may actually be losing overall efficiency. The only multitasking that we would recommend is a ‘luncheon meetings’ where you eat during a regular meeting. (Again, even eating and talking might take some getting used to.) Multitasking like taking a conference call while driving is an absolute no-no.

Combining work and non-work activities at the same time: In general, keep the work and non-work-related activities in separate compartments and never do them together, unless absolutely unavoidable. Do not take your work home (unless, of course, you have to take a conference call at an odd hour or work on a serious customer situation). Likewise, do not come to office and make personal phone calls.

Procrastination: As an old saying goes, ‘Procrastination is one of those things that is easier done than said.’ Intentionally postponing things for no good reason is an extremely dangerous and time-wasting habit. From time to time, check if you are becoming a procrastinator, especially when it comes to postponing particular activities over and over. Analyze why you are doing so and get to that activity before it becomes urgent and critical.

‘Let them wait’ attitude: Be punctual and do not make others wait for you. Others’ time is just as important as yours. Most cultures around the world really value punctuality even though we in India are a bit forgiving. If you are habitually late for your meetings, deadlines and appointments, people will start questioning your attitude.

Time problems of being Mr/Ms Ultra-Perfectionist: Are you the type who writes and rewrites a report in order to make it the best report ever written? Or simply change fonts and layouts fifteen times until you are satisfied? Chances are that you are becoming an ultra-perfectionist. Remember, every activity has what is called ‘point of diminishing returns’—putting more efforts beyond that level is simply not going to pay enough dividends.

Time problems of being Mr/Ms Nice Person: Do you raise your hand and volunteer for so many things that you are effectively squeezed for time? Are you one of those who do not know how to say ‘no’ and end up helping far too many people than your bandwidth allows? Then it is time to examine your good-Samaritan nature and create a balance. Your well-being is also important and hence, do make sure that you do not bite more than you can chew (see Chapter 19 to learn how to say no).

7.6 In Summary

An extremely disciplined approach is needed for effective time management. To summarize what we have said so far:

• Recognize that time management is an attitude, born out of respect for your time as well as other people’s time.
• Value time as money and as an opportunity.
• Realize that time management is about building an internal rhythm, synchronizing that rhythm with the external clock and being in lockstep with others.
• Have an active and effective time management system. Review your time management practices periodically.
• Catalogue your to-do activities based on their priority.
• Make a schedule each week and try to stick to it. But be flexible, as you may have to alter your schedule every once in a while due to factors beyond your control.
• Save time wherever possible by using productivity improvement tools.
• Be alert to the possibility that in trying to be an ultra-perfectionist, you may actually end up wasting time.
• Allocate enough free time and personal time to refresh yourself. Use that time effectively and wisely—and only as free time.
• ‘Close’ all activities perfectly, without leaving any loose ends.
• Learn to make realistic estimates of how long an activity can take and make realistic plans and schedules.
• Learn to handle interruptions and time overruns and how to recover from them.
• Avoid procrastination and ineffective multitasking, which are poor habits.
• Do not keep postponing ‘important but not urgent’ activities.
• Be aware that some ‘do-good’ deeds—like taking on more workload—can actually land you in time management problems.