Chapter 19. Managing Your Time
After you have finished reading this chapter, you should be able to complete the exercises and integrate the changes indicated into your behavior patterns to help you achieve a noticeable improvement in the management of your time.
If you establish sound goals for your department and yourself and learn to set priorities on a daily basis, will you automatically become more effective at managing your time? Not necessarily. You still need to deal with the basic problem of time allocation itself.
Why should you make a special effort to manage your time?
You will get employees off to a better start. Recent discussions with successful managers indicate that those who arrive at work twenty to thirty minutes ahead of their staff accomplish the following:
Improve productivity attitudes when they greet staff arrivals with an upbeat message or compliment to start the day.
Do a better job of organizing their day.
Set a better example for their own employees.
You will be less frustrated. A good manager senses and handles problems before they get out of hand. When you learn to manage your time well, you can prevent fires rather than spending more time putting them out. Because you are on top of your job—not always catching up—productivity is more even, fewer emergencies and unpleasant surprises emerge, and you have fewer problems to handle. In short, you need to manage time well so that you can create the extra time you need to be a manager.
You will have the time you need to prepare for the future. Until you learn to organize and manage your time well enough to take on additional responsibilities, you are not promotable. You cannot prepare for the next position if you are bogged down in your present job. You cannot do a good job of personal career development if you habitually operate on a crisis basis. You must make more time now through better time management to prepare for a bigger role in the future.
The better you manage your work, the more family and leisure time you will have and the better you will manage your lifestyle.
Despite his young age and modest formal education, Frank is a successful, highly respected executive in a demanding field. He has time to play racketball each day, never neglects his family, devotes time to his church, takes care of personal business matters, and still has time left over for social and personal leisure activities. How does he do it? Frank manages his time. If you could meet with him and you asked the right question, he might supply the following answers.
Each day we are given 24 hours. Each week contains 168 hours. No more no less. We all have the same amount of time. We may know people who get a lot more done in those hours than we do. We may wish to better manage our time. Of course we really don't have the entire 168 hours to manage. We need to sleep for instance. If we sleep eight hours a day, that amounts to 56 hours per week. Subtracting out the 56 hours from the 168 hours in a week leaves us with only 102 hours to manage. This number is further reduced if we subtract out the time it takes to do things that can not be avoided or done while working. For instance, your personal hygiene takes time, as do eating and traveling to work. These types of activities require our undivided attention to complete. Sure, a person may use a cell phone while commuting to work to increase personal productivity but that person is four times more likely to have an accident than the driver who gives full attention to driving.