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By Root 2420 0

across town after work, which ends at 5 PM. The cleaner closes at 6 PM. You have a 6:30 appointment for dinner with a friend. You compare your priorities and timing of the activities—priority planning. You estimate that you have one hour to get across town to the cleaners, and the round trip drive is 40 minutes—capacity planning. It is 5 PM, but instead of heading to the dry cleaners as planned, you are delayed because your boss asks for your help with a problem. You weigh the situation of heading to the cleaners versus helping your boss—priority control. You spend 40 minutes helping your boss and realize you cannot get to the cleaners before it closes. You mentally reschedule the cleaners for tomorrow—capacity control.

To be an effective manager, you must plan and execute these four functions with discipline. Some individuals are very good at performing these functions naturally; others are miserable. Most find planning and controlling their time a real problem, but do not seem to recognize the problem until it is too late. The key to effective time management is focus.

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Steps to Improve Your Productivity

Formalizing the process of applying these four functions to your projects and daily activities helps improve your productivity. Follow the eight steps here.

1. Verbalize your objectives, supporting strategy, and performance measures.

2. List the activities that you must perform to attain your objective.

3. Prioritize the activities based on causal dependencies, start times, urgency, importance, ease of completion, distastefulness, efficiency, or some other basis. Always do activities that move you closer to your goals in each facet/dimension of your life.

4. Estimate the resources (time, materials, and equipment) required.

5. Compare the resources required to the resources available.

6. Develop a simple plan for accomplishing your activities. Ensure that resources are available when needed.

7. Focus on the activity at hand. Find a quiet place and time to perform critical tasks. Do it and move on to the next item on your “to-do” list.

Do not multitask on important tasks. Eliminate distractions. Try to buffer yourself against time wasters.

8. As activities are accomplished, delayed, changed, or eliminated, adjust your list accordingly.

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Now, each step will be discussed in more detail.

1. Verbalize your objectives, supporting strategy, and performance measures.

With your goals in mind, you must decide on your objectives, strategy, and how to measure your progress in attaining these objectives prior to defining how you will accomplish your objectives. This can be as simple as writing one sentence.

2. List the activities and projects (based on your strategy) you must perform to attain your objective.

QUESTION: How do you eat an elephant?

ANSWER: One bite at a time!

Accomplishing an objective is like eating an elephant. Identifying the activities required to accomplish an objective is critical. Projects such as complete the expansion plan, write a research paper for supply chain management, study for the history test, or clean the apartment have little meaning. Be more specific. What are the specific activities that must be performed to accomplish these projects?

List those activities that should be accomplished today. Do not start too many different and unrelated activities at one time. It is far better to focus your attention on a complete project and devote enough time to completing the project or a major activity of the project than to do a little of a lot of different activities simultaneously (multitasking). We discussed the problems of multitasking (briefly defined, it is moving back and forth across several different tasks at one time) in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 on project management.

3. Prioritize the activities based on causal dependencies (what must be done first, second, etc.), urgency, importance, timing, ease of completion, efficiency, distastefulness, or some other basis.

Do not over-prioritize. Some activities are urgent, while others are