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By Root 2777 0

Your time is precious and your goal is to have a higher quality of life. You need to accomplish work, academic, social, family, service, and personal activities to accomplish this goal. You devote a certain number of hours each day, say, 10 hours, to accomplishing these activities. While you may work 10 hours a day, you may accomplish more or less than 10 hours of work—more by working faster than usual or less by having more interruptions than usual. You may estimate that you have 4 hours of work in calling project members to set up your expansion project, but you were able to complete the work in 2 hours. You consumed 4 hours of forecasted work; therefore, you need to have additional work available to start on or you will not take advantage of the 2-hour savings in actual time. If you never take advantage of time savings and you always suffer the consequences of delays and interruptions (Murphy), then you will always be behind your schedule.

The “buffer” is the amount of work (measured in time) you have planned and with you, ready to be worked on in case Murphy strikes and you cannot perform the next scheduled task. The objective of a buffer is to increase your effectiveness by planning to have the next activity (work) available to you when you complete your current activity. Additionally, the second highest priority activity should also be present in case an interruption prevents you from proceeding on the planned activity. In fact, a couple of hours of high priority work should always be available for you to perform. Most people plan for only the current activity, and when Murphy strikes, they end up wasting the time allocated to that task because they did not plan effectively.

For capacity control purposes, the buffer should be divided into three regions (similar to the traffic light colors)—red (eminent tasks, the task that should be worked on from the present to the next few hours), yellow (lower priority tasks), and green (tasks to be performed later in the day). These regions are sometimes called region 1, 2, and 3. Region (red) contains the immediate activities to be performed; region 2 (yellow), the later priority activities; and region 3 (green), the last activities of those to be performed during the buffer period. Activities in region 1 are performed first, and as performed, activities from region 2 and 3 move up in priority and are performed as sequenced. If, for some reason, you cannot manage an activity in sequence, then move to the next activity in priority sequence and perform the skipped activity when you get a chance.

An example of the buffered “to-do” list is provided in Fig. 38-6. First, you have to prioritize your activities (priority planning) and estimate their time duration (capacity planning). Notice several items (meetings, classes, appointments) in the list are time related. Next, you have to identify any requirements for accomplishing the activity (e.g., files, reports, books, notes, and meeting and class times). List the activities in priority sequence with any known requirements and the estimated capacity required (time) to complete the activity. The buffer has arbitrarily been set at approximately 15 hours of work (from leaving home in the morning to returning at night), with each of the three regions (red, yellow, and green) containing approximately 5 hours. You initially indicated spending about 10 hours per day working on your activities, but Monday is a particularly heavy day. You, in fact, will be away from your apartment for 15 hours. The buffer is set larger than this time period to ensure that if Murphy strikes (e.g., the boss is busy and reschedules or your production meeting is canceled), you won’t run out of work before you return to your apartment. Priority control (sticking to the plan) is accomplished as time progresses.

FIGURE 38-6 An example of a buffered “to-do” list.

Suppose your boss calls and reschedules your 8 AM meeting for 10 AM. You can check your “to-do” list, move your task of working on the month resource plan to 8 AM, and then go to the meeting with your