Professional Practice
Skills
PPS-21: Time Management
(Adapted
from MPS 17,
Pre-class assignment
What is It?
Time Management is the skill of using
time to better achieve your goals.
New Concepts
Activity
Log
Why Do It?
The simple
answer to “Why manage your time?” is to get more done, but that misses the
bigger question. What is the “more” that
you want to do? On the job, if
you can do 30% more work in a day than the guy in the next cubicle, the reward
may be that you get assigned even more work while getting paid about the same
as the less efficient guy. On this path
you are more likely to “go postal” than become CEO.
Time
management should help you achieve your goals. It is about focusing on most important and
urgent tasks and delaying or skipping the tasks with less importance or
urgency. The important tasks are the
ones that achieve your goals.
How to Do It
The How to
do it section is in four parts
What am I doing now?
Most people
get to the end of the day or week and wonder where the heck the time went. The first step to managing time is to answer
that question. The most direct way to
find where the time goes is to spend a week writing down what you do.
To record
your time, divide the pages of a notebook into two columns, Task and Time
Started. Each time you start a new task,
log the time and very brief description of the task. Logging your time for a week is a
time-consuming pain, but useful in the tong term for finding wasted time.
At the end
of the week, tally the number of hours spent in different activities. Each individual will have different
categories. As an example, consider a
single college student living on campus.
Categories may include sleeping, eating, exercising, attending class,
studying, socializing, and surfing web/game playing/e-mailing.
A review of
your activity log can help you see where changes could be made and may help you
set your priorities. After you have set
your priorities and have changed your work habits, you will want to do another
time log to see if your changes have been successful.
What do I want to do?
Those of
you who are ambitious can probably quote “Begin with the end in mind” from
Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful
People. You already have personal
and professional goals and a detailed five-year plan.
The rest of
us are thinking about what we’ll have for lunch today. Unfortunately for us, those ambitious people
probably have a plan for our time as well.
For self-defense, we lazy folk need some goals, too.
Our personal
and professional goals will form the basis for setting priorities. If our goal is corporate success, we’ll reduce
time with counterproductive activities (low exposure job tasks and time with
family and lazy friends) and focus on productive tasks (high exposure tasks and
time with powerful people). If our goal
is family, we’ll be changing diapers and coaching soccer instead of
volunteering to present that killer PowerPoint presentation to management. Just remember, if you don’t choose, someone
will choose for you.
What is the next task?
Once you
have goals, you can begin to prioritize tasks.
Most of us have had a go at making To-Do lists, or used planners or
calendars to schedule tasks. These are
good for making sure we get to an appointment and have checked off all the
tasks, but not so good for deciding whether or not to attend the meeting, or
which task should come first.
One way to
assign priorities is use the Importance
- Time Sensitivity decision table shown below. We evaluate our task to see in which quadrant
it belongs.
|
|
|
Time Sensitivity |
|
|
|
|
Urgent |
Not Urgent |
|
Importance |
Critical
to my Goals |
I |
II |
|
Less Important |
III |
IV |
|
Any given
task will have some sense of urgency, perhaps a deadline or scheduled time, and
will have some importance with respect to your goals. Thus, it will fall into one of the four numbered
quadrants.
Certainly a
task in quadrant I (Urgent and Critical to my
Goals) will rate a high priority while the quadrant IV (Not Urgent, Less Important)
tasks will go on a back burner. The
other two quadrants are about the same priority. For example, your daughter’s dance recital
this evening is sufficiently time sensitive to rate Urgent, but it may have little relevance to your
personal/professional goals (quadrant III).
If so, it may rate about the same as tennis with your supervisor
(quadrant II).
This decision won’t be aided by the table.
Since some
of the items at the end of the priority list are going to be skipped. If someone asks you to perform a task that is
in quadrant III or IV, you should
say “No”. Agreeing to a task and failing
to perform it, is a good way to kill trust and makes achieving your own goals
harder. Your “No” answer should be
polite but firm, so the requestor has little wiggle room. Answers of “No” to your boss have to be
particularly tactful.
How do I know the Task is complete?
Most
engineers know when a meeting is over, but can’t tell when their design is
complete. There are many engineering tasks
(designing, programming, and improving) that are like housework – they are
never finished. The same thing can
happen with students and homework. Some
find that design, laboratory, or programming courses “take more time than the
rest of my courses put together”.
So, how do
we decide what is “good enough”.
Designing to a well defined minimum standard, rather than designing to
an ideal is a good place to start. Then
anything above minimum is a bonus. If we
design to an ideal, we’ll always fall short.
Students do this all the time when they do just enough work for a “C”
and hope its better.
Another way
to prevent design tasks from subsuming your life is to build time fences around
them. You can limit your time on the
task to a certain number of hours per day or week to make sure that other parts
of your life don’t get completely pushed out.
You can also set hard deadlines for last design change before
production. As a student you can budget
a certain number of hours per course.
For this technique to work, you have to be able to stop and move on when
the time is complete. Some people use
timers.
Learning Objectives
In-Class Exercise
Exercise 1
Given a set of goals, use the Importance - Time Sensitivity decision
table to prioritize the following tasks.
Assignment
This assignment has two parts,
keeping an Activity Log for a week and setting personal/professional goals.
Activity Log
Evaluation
Each of the parts a, b, and c of step
4 will be evaluated on the same scale. The
work will be shown to four or five peers (student graders). Students will individually rate the work on a
scale of 1 to 10 with
10 – Looks like an entirely true and sincere work,
with no inventions or B.S.. Activity log
covers the entire time with minimal or zero omissions. Time Tally has at least 5 reasonable
categories and there is good agreement between time log and Tally.
5 – Relatively sincere effort with some
significant omissions or attempts “to remember what they did”. Time Tally has fewer than five reasonable
categories and times do not correspond well with Activity log. Lessons learned are weak.
1 – Looks like they made it up, copied from
someone else just before class, or stole it from a web site. Significant parts are missing or
half-hearted.
The top three peer scores for each part
of step 4 will be averaged to determine the score for that part.
Personal/Professional Goals
Evaluation
Numbers 5) and 6) will be evaluated
in the same manner as above.
Time Management Feedback Form
Name _______________________
1.
At
the outset of this unit, place a “B” in each category to indicate your self
assessment of your initial, or baseline skill level.
2.
At
the end of the unit place an “A” in each category to indicate your self
assessment of your skill level after practicing the skill. Be prepared to provide documentation for your
assessment.
|
Novice (less successful) |
Beginner (shows little expert behavior) (1-2) |
Good Start (some expert behavior) (3-4) |
Getting There (frequent expert behavior) (5-6) |
Almost There (mostly expert behavior) (7-8) |
Expert (shows all expert behavior) (9-10) |
Expert (more successful) |
|
Doesn’t
know where the time goes |
|
|
|
|
|
Has kept a
time log to see where the time goes. |
|
Just works
at stuff, and keeps track in their head |
|
|
|
|
|
Make task
lists, use planner, calendar |
|
Doesn’t
worry about goals |
|
|
|
|
|
Sets personal/
professional goals |
|
Makes a
list and starts doing the tasks in any order. |
|
|
|
|
|
Prioritizes
tasks based on goals |
|
Works
until the job is perfect. |
|
|
|
|
|
Works to
“good enough” or for set time |
Reflections
What did I
learn from this?
Which of
the skills do I do pretty well? (List
Evidence)
Which skills could use some work?
(List Evidence)
A Time Management concept that annoys
me
A favorite
of the time management folks is the Pareto Principle or the 80-20 Rule. The 80-20 Rule says that 80% of your results
come from 20% of the effort. (It also
predicts that 20% of the people have 80% of the wealth or 20% of your customers
provide 80% of your profit). This seems
perfectly reasonable, so what is annoying?
The annoying part is when people try to apply the rule by violating it.
My whining
falls into two categories, theoretical and practical. First, if it is truly a rule, then we can’t
do much about it, and second, attempts to get around the Pareto principle lead
to annoying results. The theoretical
argument requires no support, but for the practical we’ll provide examples.
Let’s take
a look at the task of performing an engineering calculation to predict stress
in a bridge. Suppose we apply the Pareto
principle and put in our 20% effort (to save time) and get 80% of the
results. I doubt that Pareto would want
to stand on or under that bridge. Safety
issues require 100% results. Shortcuts
are (and should be) actionable under civil or criminal law.
Companies
like Wal-Mart have applied the principle with ruthless efficiency. The Pareto principle is why you have such
limited choices (they only sell products that produce the most return) and why
you get such crappy service (you are a small customer for whom service provides
little return).
Lastly, you
get the folks who invert the principle and say it means you should spend 80% of
your time on the 20% of the tasks that are most important. Their level of misunderstanding invites
cynicism, and you have to assume they are practicing management by buzzword.