Better Time Management

You might hear yourself saying that you are “too busy to get all your work done!” Almost a paradox, this is the common plight of today’s “knowledge-worker”. So, how do you make yourself less busy so that you can concentrate on the work that matters? Birkinshaw and Cohen studied this question and published their results in the HBR article “Make Time for the Work That Matters” (September 2013). They found that most knowledge workers spend their time managing up, down or across whilst also managing externally and also performing desk work. Generally, not much adjustment could be found to managing up, down or externally; however on average, up to 20% of a knowledge-worker’s week could be saved by reviewing their time spent on “desk-based work” and “managing across.”

Here’s how to better manage your time followed by further considerations (“et alors”).

Better Time Management

From their research the authors found that “desk-based work” and “managing across” were considered not only time consuming, but low value-added and often tedious. So why is this work being done? Mostly because of being “entangled in a web of commitments from which it can be painful to extricate ourselves.” Addressing this root cause, the authors propose a five-point plan to better manage your time:

Identify low-value tasks

Look at your daily activities and decide which ones are not important to you or your firm. Then consider whether they are relatively easy to drop, delegate or redesign. For those that match these two criteria, you have “targets.”

Drop, Delegate or Redesign

Drop “quick kills” (those activities which you can stop immediately with no negative effects); delegate “opportunities” (activities which may be of more value to your team members); or redesign processes (which may require investment, but will save time in the long-term).

Off-load tasks

Caught in the belief that if you want something done properly you should do it yourself? Actually most knowledge-workers can delegate a further 2-20% of their work “with no decline in their productivity or their team’s.” Besides team engagement improving, you save time!

Allocate freed-up time

A common trap is to save time and then just have it fill up with more “desk-based” and “managing across” work. To be effective, determine how best to allocate the time that you have saved! Just make a simple note of 2 or 3 things that you can (now) do and make sure you do them!

Commit to your plan

Share your plan with a mentor, your boss or a colleague. Explain why you are dropping, delegating, redesigning or “off-loading” certain activities. By making a promise to others, a public commitment will help you from returning to bad habits.

Et alors

It is important to remember that the focus is on “desk-based work” and “managing across” activities. You will probably be already spending an appropriate amount of time managing up, down and externally and these tasks will normally be difficult to rearrange. What might happen when applying the five-step plan is that you end up spending more time managing down, but there should be a positive pay-off to this! In the research, the authors found that there was another category of work that hardly anyone had time to save from because they did not do enough of it to start with: that was the “training and development” of staff. Executives in this particular study only spent on average 1% of their time on talent development. Evidently there is a trade-off between short and long-term time management, but if you are too busy to get your work done, you might want to consider stopping and instead developing your team so that you can effectively start delegating, redesigning and off-loading!