Making Time to Manage

Making Time to Manageby Robert C. DorneyTime management is more about management than about time. Being a naturally disorganized person, I suppose it was inevitable that I should become president of a company dedicated to helping executives organize their work and plan their time.I am no longer president, but in the 40 years I served in that capacity, time management became an accepted technique for focusing executive energy on the most important tasks, Hewlett-Packard AT&T, Marriott, Xerox, and a host of other companies give employees instruction in time management, particularly those moving into supervisory positions. The reason is very simple: the more responsibility people have, the more valuable their time and the more difficult the time-juggling act becomes. The idea of time management is so widely accepted that it appears in many places. In the comics, Cathy tries it in an effort to bring order to her life. In Madonna’s latest film, her suitor throws his diary into a ditch to symbolize his adoption of a more spontaneous life-style. Money magazine includes time management tools among the props that not-so-busy people use to create the opposite impression.The idea goes far back in history too. Charlemagne is supposed to have used striped candles to help him apportion his time among his various duties as Holy Roman emperor. Napoleon habitually refused to answer his correspondence for six months on the assumption that it posedproblems that would go away if he ignored them. Thus he saved himself untold hours solving problems for subordinates.“Time management is a little like statistics,” Stuart Smith, director of management development at Laventhal & Horwath, told me recently. “They’re necessary and good, but only when linked to relevant functions.I find in teaching statistics that students cross the boredom barrier when I cross the relevance threshold. We therefore include time management in our training, but not as a separate discipline. We fold it into our curriculum of management skills. This connects it to the achievement of goals and the ordering of priorities.”Is it possible that some executives scorn time management because they fail to see its relevance? But if the achievement of goals and the ordering of priorities are managerial functions (and who would deny it?), the relevance is clear. The more valuable a person’s time, the more carefully the spending of it needs scrutiny.If asked, very few executives could say how they spend their time. Most know what they ought to be doing; they may even allocate blocks of time to specified tasks. But that’s not the same as getting on with them.I submit a corollary: most people don’t know what their time is worth. It’s simple enough to take your annual salary, add 40% or thereabouts for perks and benefits, and then divide the sum by 2,000 or some other number of hours to come up with an hourly rate. The Exhibitdemonstrates the value-or at least the price-of executive time. Knowledge of the big numbers might encourage some executives to abandon trivial tasks and get on with running the enterprise.On the other hand, it might contribute to stress. An executive might say to herself anxiously, “Am I really worth $168.27 an hour when I’m reading a trade magazine?”The answer is “probably not.”But I doubt that that realization would induce her to spend more time managing (whatever that means) if she were not already so disposed.Focus on the second wordTime management is more about management than about time. Writing everything down in a planner or diary may inspire a feeling of ineffable virtue and even well-being. But if you’re tracking activities you shouldn’t be involved in at all, you aren’t managing your time.Unless you keep records, it’s easy to think you are managing, planning, organizing, and setting goals, when in fact you may be spending most of your hours putting out fires, solving problems for subordinates, or worse, creating problems for your subordinates.In Japan recently, I drove around Tokyo with an extremely successful Japanese businessman. Every time he had an idea, he called his office on his cellular phone. I reflected that he was not only interrupting himself but also creating chaos in his office. That this could happen in Japan, thatexemplar of efficiency and enlightened management, astounded me.As a student of Japanese business and culture, I’m emboldened to dispel my own astonishment: while the Japanese are very efficient in production, very precise in market analysis, and adept in statistical process control, they aren’t very well organized. They make up for this deficiency by working extremely hard-harder, it’s been noted often and with some asperity, than their American counterparts. Their keen interest in and enthusiasm for time management may have severe consequences for our trade deficit if it helps them further boost their efficiency. Balancing actBalancing is the most difficult part of managing one’s own time. What meetings should I attend, which should I skip? Must I read all these reports? Should every important customer have access to my ear? What’s important for me to know firsthand, and what can I delegate to others, is hard to pinpoint.I used to set Saturdays aside for product development, the part of my job I liked most. So I enjoyed working Saturdays until my son started playing football at a university three hours distant. To see him play, I had to leave Friday afternoon. That ended Saturdays devoted to work. I had to rearrange my entire weekly schedule to include product development, and that forced me to analyze where and how I was spending my time.That analysis eventually brought me to place a value on my everyactivity. Some of them justified a valuation several times that of others. While product development justified five times that of others. While product development justified five times my hourly rate, obviously I couldn’t spend all my time on it. What was equally obvious, I had to limit the time I spent on less important work that didn’t merit half my hourly rate.The answer lay in allocating time to the various activities so that when I multiplied the hours devoted to each one by the hourly rate assigned to it, the total would be one that my board of directors and I could live with. Most readers will recognize this as yet another application of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s 80-20 principle. Only instead of applying it to taxation of the “vital few” who pay 80% of the taxes, I apply it to the significant functions that produce 80% or more of the return while still giving the “trivial many” the time they are worth.The arenas I operated in, besides product development, included these: Selecting and training a successor Long-range planning Short-range planning Reviewing budgets Conducting staff meetings Talking with customers Reviewing senior staff performance Delegating Community activities Facilities planning Meeting suppliers Reading mailReading professional journals RecreationI assigned the highest value (5) to those activities that have a direct bearing on the company’s future. They numbered only two: choosing and training my successor, and product development. Now, some might question the president’s deep involvement in product development. And rightly so. But it depends on how important new products are to ensure the company’s continued good health. The criterion I apply is: Can anyone else do it as well? Having settled that question with my usual modesty, I acknowledged that in an ideal world I would find and train a good engineer to direct product development.It is a truism that many chief executives spend much of their time in their previous function. A president out of engineering tends to hang around the engineering department. A president from advertising tends to rewrite copy and fret over layouts-which is exactly where he or she should spend the least amount of time. Having expertise in the field should enable the president to judge the work of that department with dispatch and precision. When an engineer-president reviews engineering, his or her expertise warrants assignment of the highest value to that time. But the instant the president sits down at a CAD terminal, the value drops to the rate paid those engaged in computer-assisted design.And another point: the hourly value of an activity varies inversely with the amount of time spent. The reason is that as an activity takes over a president’s time, it tends to become and end in itself, an activity with littleor no benefit. This applies even to a CEO’s most important responsibility, planning. Plans should be blueprints for action, not a way to fill a bookshelf with impressive binders without issue.Who can do it better?Delegating is the executive’s greatest need as well as greatest privilege. Most of it, of course, should happen automatically. Reviewing a market plan, say, is a function of the marketing vice president, not that person’s boss. The act of delegating rates a value of 3, and that only when applying structure to a totally new responsibility.While marketing clearly bears directly on the compan y’s future, the criterion for CEO involvement is not just importance. The overriding question is: Can someone do the job better? Today, even strategic planning has become a delegated function. Value factors must therefore satisfy both criteria before the chief enters the picture.Which brings me back to balancing. How can you control the demands made on you, the interruptions, the upward delegation, the unwanted invitations? There are ways to limit your involvement. Let me give an example, my name is known to many of our customers because it appears in most of our company literature. So I get myriads of phone calls from customers with suggestions or complaints. A certain amount of time I spend that way, though I assign it a value of 1, is productive. At some point, though, its value benefit vanishes.I have a way to satisfy the customer and spare my time. The technique is less important than the purpose, which is to assign responsibility. When I learn what’s on the customer’s mind, I say, “I want someone else to hear this too.” I dial up a conference call, stay on for a few seconds, and then explain that Ms. So-and-So knows far more about this matter than I do and will take care of it.The question of who can do it better also applies to the time-monitoring task. To focus on things they have identified as having the greatest impact on the future of their companies, many CEOs I have talked to keep detailed records of their daily activities. Some then dictate that record to a secretary or executive assistant. It’s a laborious, boring, and time-consuming task. But they are convinced they have to do it to keep their priorities straight.I’d go a step further. A CEO needs someone of unquestioned loyalty and discretion to monitor his or her activities against the template of differential values. I see two advantages to this tactic: it relieves the chief of the bothersome task of logging time and it offers the CEO a more detached view of how well the objective is being met.While most companies have stated priorities and goals, it’s a common lament that they are not consistently addressed. They become mere articles of faith, often repeated but not vigorously pursued.Placing higher values on those activities that serve stated priorities andpromise to achieve stated goals provides a means of measuring executive performance. Executives who consistently ask themselves, “Did I earn my salary today?”and have developed a quantitative method for answering that question should have the motivation necessary to make sure it is answered affirmatively.EXHIBIT What Is the Price of Executive Time?BenefitsAnnual Weekly (40% of Total Value/ Value/ Salary Salary Weekly Salary) Week Hour* Minute$ 50,000 $ 961.54 $ 384.62 $ 1,346.16 $ 33.65 $ 0.56 60,000 1,153.85 461.54 1,615.39 40.38 0.6775,000 1,442.31 576.93 2,019.24 50.48 0.84 100,000 1,923.08 769.23 2,692.31 67.31 1.12 250,000 4,807.70 1,923.08 6,730.78 168.27 2.80*40-hour weekNote: Robert C. Dorney：Associated since 1947 with Day-Timers, Inc., a producer of self-organization systems for managers, Robert C. Dorney was president until early in 1987, when he stepped down to become senior vice president and director of product development. In 1972, Day-Timers was acquired by Beatrice Companies, then became part of E-II Holdings Inc. when that corporation was formed in 1986.。