Management Skills:Managing Your Time

Managing Your Time

Projects are dynamic. They are constantly changing and imposing new demands upon your time. How do you manage your time so that you can stay on top of what is happening and avoid having things "slip through the cracks"?

Time management is a study in its own right. Companies offer courses in how to manage time, and any stationer stocks numerous diaries, all claiming to hold the key to time management success. Many of these resources are valuable, and anyone who needs to stay on top of events should learn time management practices.

Of course, you will need a daily diary or appointment book in which you will enter all the meetings that you will need to attend. But time management is more than simply posting meetings on a calendar; it is a means of dealing with two questions: Am I making the best use of my time, and have I forgotten anything? You ensure that both of these questions are handled by two techniques: setting daily priorities and posting future events.

Setting Daily Priorities

Setting daily priorities means listing in your diary, at the start of the day, all the things you need to do during the day, then setting priorities for them. This is more than a simple "to-do list" in that the items on the list are coded in order of importance.

Building a priority list has two steps. First, build the list. Next, set priorities. Do not attempt to assign priorities until you have developed the list and you can determine the relative importance of the items. One effective method of establishing priorities is an "ABC" system of classification. Once you have built your list, classify each item as A (must be done today), B (should be done today, but can slip), and C (optional). Then examine the A items and set priorities, e.g., Al, A2,...

This planning should take no more than fifteen minutes each day and will yield your daily plan. You can now scan your list for the item with the highest priority and go to work. When you have finished, pull out your list, check off the item you have just completed, then scan for the next highest priority.

You will, of course, be interrupted with demands on your time that are not on the list. Add the new demand to your list, then quickly review it to determine its priority. You do not need to renumber your list. If the new item is more important than the item with priority A6, but less important than the item with priority A5, label it A5. When you come to A5 on your list, make a judgment call as to which item is more important. If the interruption is something that you must handle now, do so, but make sure that you enter it on your list and check it off as complete. In that way, you will have a notation that the task was handled, and you will have one more completed item on your list.

The advantage of this system is that you are always working on the most important outstanding item. The exception is meetings to which you have previously committed. They may be lower on your list of priorities than whatever you are doing at the time, but, because others are involved and have made time in their schedules, you cannot normally cancel a meeting because it is less important. However, if your presence is not essential, send your regrets.

As you work through your list, keep track of each item with some form of code. For example, when you complete an item, check it off. If you cancel it, mark it with an X. If it is in progressfor example, you have called someone and left a messagemark it with a circle. If you cannot complete an itemfor example, the person  you need to speak to is away for three daysmark the event with an arrow and transfer it to the day when the person will be available.

By tracking the items in this way, you will have a snapshot of what you have done and what is outstanding. More important, at the end of the day, especially if it is one of those days that feels unproductive, you can glance at the set of check marks to reassure yourself that you have accomplished things.

Your diary can also serve as an information repository. For example, you need to get some costs on equipment maintenance, so one of the items on your list is to call the vendor sales representative. During the discussion, do not scribble the numbers on a loose sheet of paper or a yellow Post-it Note; enter them directly into your diary. In this way, you will not lose them, and whenever anybody asks for them, you will have them at hand. Furthermore, if the vendor subsequently questions the costs, you can say, "On May 17, I called George, your sales rep, and was given these numbers."

Posting Future Events

Posting future events means entering actions on your list in advance. It ensures that you will not forget things. For example, if Fred has promised to call you with some information by the fifteenth of the month, write "Call Fred re . . ." on your diary's action list for the sixteenth. If Fred does call, you can delete the item. If he does not, then posting the action to call him on the sixteenth ensures that you will not forget about the information he was to provide.

You also post events when you cannot complete an event today. For example, you have called Mary and left a message, but she has not returned your call. Tomorrow, when you are building your list, scan today's list for unfinished actions and enter them on the new list. Since your call to Mary is not complete, it is one of the actions that gets posted so that you will not forget to follow up.

Posting future events also reminds you of larger commitments. If you have agreed to make a presentation to the management committee on the twenty-third and you estimate that you need to start work on it no later than the twenty-first, enter the action in your diary on the twenty-first. Then forget about it. Your diary will remind you of the presentation when it is time. If you need a block of time to work on the presentation, mark it off as an appointment.

This will ensure that you leave the time available and will also remind you, when you are filling up the day's appointments, that you have a major task coming due.

Managing Issues and Action Items

How well you manage issues and action items will determine how successful your projects are. Things that ''slip through the cracks" are not usually your WBS activities. They are the endless details that arise during the project. Your daily diary is the mechanism by which you handle them.

Issues are documented in the issues log, and action items appear in minutes of meetings. Both carry with them the names of those responsible and dates for resolution. Whenever you update the issues log or prepare (or receive) a set of meeting minutes, transfer all items that have been assigned to you into your diary on the appropriate days. When you plan your list for any one of the days, those items will automatically be included.

You can also use your diary to track critical actions that you assigned to others. If you require a resolution to an issue by March 15, make an entry for March 13 to call the team member to find out the status. Then when you follow up on March 15, the team member cannot, legitimately or otherwise, say, "Oh, I forgot to check that out."

Juggling Multiple Projects

You may find that your management has such confidence in you that they assign you to manage two or more projects. Your diary is the tool that allows you to do that. The only differences are that the sources of your daily items are the issues logs, meeting minutes, and informal queries from several projects, and that when you set priorities, you need to consider priorities among different projects.

The details of a single project are sufficiently complex and numerous that you will find them impossible to manage without a formal system. Managing multiple projects is even more difficult. The diary, with its prioritized list of items and its forward posting, is the means for getting control over the details.