Lesson 16
Most
People Waste Time The Same Way Every Day.
Robert Benchley was bullish on human determination when he said, “Anyone
can do any amount of work...provided
it isn’t what he’s supposed to be doing at the time.” The following thought was found in the pages
of Boardroom Reports: "All you can do with
time is spend it or waste it. Find the
best ways to spend available time and the appropriate amount of time for each
task. Concentrate on the best ways to
spend time, instead of worrying about saving it."
In
a recent survey of business managers, people named their own lack of time
management for 92 percent of the failures among those under their supervision. This raises the ominous question, “How do
managers waste so much time?” Several
reasons top the list:
• The most common contributor
to wasted management time is doing an employee’s job for him or her.
• Another cause of lost
productivity in management is doing tasks that can be handled by someone with
less responsibility.
• It’s common to find a
manager spending a disproportionate amount of time on a favorite or pet project
at the expense of items that are more valuable to the organization as a whole.
• Repeating instructions is
another time killer. This misguided
practice teaches employees that they don’t have to take action until the boss
instructs them for the third time.
Minor
corrections can mean major improvements.
For example, if a manager figures out a way to save only 10 minutes
every work day, that savings will total 42 extra hours gained at the end of a
year. That would be like having a
53-week year, and would result in one heck of an increase in productivity--all
from just 10 minutes per day. The
average person spends 150 hours per year looking for things. That's almost a full week. Get organized.
Here
are three of Peter F. Drucker's most important suggestions for liberating time:
• Record your time. Don’t count on your memory for
an accurate assessment of how you spend your time.
• Manage your time. Drucker said, “Until we can
manage time, we can manage nothing else.”
Managing means being aware of and proactively appropriating time to
tasks rather than letting time “get away
from us.” Plan your time, but also
time your plan.
• Consolidate your time. Group chores
together to increase efficiency.
Here
are some of the most commonly given excuses for not planning time. Don't fall for them:
• The excuse, "It takes
too long,” really means, “I would rather focus on a day-by-day or short-term
basis and just see what happens.”
• The excuse, "I don’t
have enough information to plan well,” really means, “I don’t have enough faith
in the information I’ve gathered so far so I’d better wait.”
• The excuse, “It’s impossible
to predict the future,” really means, “I would have to give up acting on
impulse and develop new disciplines.”
No comments:
Post a Comment