#Time wasted how to
These authors have discovered that three requirements of executives’ jobs-organizing day-to-day activities, improving performance under pressure, and getting subordinates to be more productive-cause so much anxiety that many managers retreat to performing more routine tasks they already know how to do. Beneath these symptoms lies the disease: managers’ anxiety that comes with tackling innovative activities. This problem remains unsolved, the authors of this article say, because most cures focus on the symptoms-long meetings, unnecessary telephone calls, and tasks that could be turned over to subordinates or secretaries. Seldom, however, is managers’ productivity mentioned, although the problem of managerial time wasting was recognized as enormous long before anyone thought of quality circles. The news lately has been filled with reports of the need to improve workers’ productivity if the United States is going to compete successfully with the Japanese and the West Germans. One engineering group, discovering they spent 50% of their time responding to routine service problems, decided to help customers on the phone before resorting to more time-consuming field visits. Combine your insights with other managers’ to identify more effective work habits.Ask questions about your three large managerial responsibilities: “Which daily activities are most/least productive? How much time do I spend on innovation? What do I feel most/least confident about asking subordinates to do?”.
Document your actual use of time-e.g., log time segments in your appointment book.Augment busyness-destroying disciplines with traditional time-management techniques: They then selected one or two projects to produce tangible results most quickly, and prepared written plans for achieving the new goals.Ĥ. Apply steps 1 and 2 to these new pieces.Īfter the bank’s two initial projects had progressed, the division managers identified crucial improvement opportunities in their own areas.“Capture” other aspects of your work by further breaking ill-defined projects into achievable increments.Early successes inspire you to apply these disciplines more broadly. These steps reduce time-wasting activities’ allure, give you a sense of control, and ease anxiety. Include just enough detail to stay focused.Clarify how you’ll measure, report on, and review progress.For each subgoal, write steps and timetables.Commit to achieving these tasks in weeks, not months.Ī bank’s senior managers were overwhelmed by 50,000 unresolved transactions due to interest rate fluctuations.To more effectively tackle this challenge, they defined two modest initial projects: four-day coverage of 85% of overdraft accounts within 60 days, and collection of fees from other banks whose errors had further delayed processing.They achieved gratifying results.Select projects focused on bottom-line results e.g., “increase output 10%” versus “install a new inventory system.”.Carve off several short-term tasks from ill-defined, long-term behemoths.Break big, amorphous projects into manageable pieces. Here’s how to begin replacing anxiety with the confidence essential for tackling your toughest challenges.ġ. Their companies pay the price: too many people on a job, overly complicated structures, excessive analysis, not enough action. Most managers spend just 47% of their time on managerial work. Improving performance under intense pressureīut when we avoid these responsibilities, the misspent time generates additional pressure and anxiety-making busyness even more seductive.To allay that anxiety, we escape into busyness-handling routine tasks we already know how to do, and avoiding our primary responsibilities: That’s because real managerial work, with its vagueness, ambiguous accountability, and muddy causal connections, generates intense anxiety. Many managers would answer “A” to both questions. Do you prefer: A) sorting through your daily e-mail or B) drafting a strategic plan? A) fighting shop-floor fires or B) creating an innovative production-scheduling system?
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