Time (Priority) Management - Part 2

Time management is a fallacy. Time doesn't need you to "manage" it - it's been getting along just fine without you for billions of years. We can't manage time. What we CAN manage is what we do with that time. And yet, the overwhelming evidence is that professionals and managers do NOT "manage what they do with that time."

There's a shocking CHASM between our behavior in this area and our knowledge of what to do. Everyone always talks about how busy they are, but when you look at their calendars, there's often no EVIDENCE that they're busy. There are vast swaths of unscheduled time!

So, the question is, how can we start to become more efficient about using the time that each of us has at our disposal? In fact, that's a great way to state it: STOP disposing of your time! It's not only your most precious resource, it's also your most perishable.

Peter Drucker, in the first prescriptive chapter of his seminal work, The Effective Executive, says it best (of course): "The output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In the process we call 'accomplishment', this is time. Of the other major resources, money is actually quite plentiful People one can hire. But one cannot rent, hire, buy or otherwise obtain more time."

In the demanding, fast-paced professional world we live in, there's simply little room for error when it comes to managing our priorities. And, if you aren't spending your time on your key priorities, it's really hard to argue that you should be able to keep your job if you're not meeting your key deliverables.

And one might say - but the major stuff seems to get done, in that we're not getting firedbut yet you're telling me we're way off base on how we're spending our time. How is that possible? Well, you are, in many cases, being saved by the fire drills. Every once in a while, what's really important becomes TIME-WISE important, and the boss tells everyone that for the next week, no one does anything but X, because it's the end of the quarter, or we have a big push on, or whatever. We make up for our overall inefficiencies by cramming, by "laser focusing," by sheer brute force at times. And it works, after a fashion.

But enough is enough, what the heck do we DO about this problem? How can Manager Tools listeners take advantage of this opportunity to become more efficient and more effective?