Be strategic about your time

(Source: Rita McGrath, Harvard Business School http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/mcgrath/2008/05/be-strategic-about-your-time.html)

In the frantic buzz of most managerial lives, I see people running from meeting to meeting, consulting their BlackBerrys as though in prayer, desperately working into the night to cope with a deluge of emails and otherwise being busy, busy, busy. The dilemma of all this activity, however, is that it is for the most part what academics long ago termed "non value-added time."

Years ago, former Harvard Business School professors Steven Wheelwright and Kim Clark (who also served as Dean) documented a catastrophic decline in the amount of value-added time people bring to work once they are assigned to more than two projects. By the time the respondents in their study reported that they were working on 7 projects, their productive time at work dropped to about 15% (See attached chart). Ironically, the more "stuff" one takes on, the less one seems to accomplish.

So what can you do to get more value-added productivity into your days? A few suggestions:

Develop a set of screens or scorecards that can help you systematically winnow the attractive opportunities from the less attractive.  Follow eight simple rules:

• Ask what needs to be done.

• Ask what’s right for the enterprise.

• Develop action plans.

• Take responsibility for decisions.

• Take responsibility for communicating.

• Focus on opportunities, not problems.

• Run productive meetings.

• Think and say “We,” not “I.”

 

I've got one that I use for considering new clients, and it helps to set priorities clearly.

• Try to bring old projects to some kind of closure before new ones get on the list.
• Make sure to book some time with yourself for those strategic, but non-urgent tasks (like thinking, or writing) that tend to get crowded out by urgent demands. I have one client who has a mythical person named "Joe" - meetings with Joe are for thinking, and it's understood that they are not to be interrupted.
• Check email only twice a day (promise- it won't kill you!)
• Try to make the consequences of your tradeoffs clear to those (like a boss or colleague) who may be creating excess work for you.
• Match your strategic priorities with how you spend your time - and question activities that don't drive those priorities.

• And finally, do question the value of every activity - if it simply didn't get done, what would happen?