Managing time means managing yourself

Written by changthai11 on Friday, October 10th, 2008

Traln The TRAINER

AL LOCk

I’ve been asked by the Asian Business Forum to speak in November on the topic of time and priority management. It would be very easy to talk about using Microsoft Outlook or other tools for managing tasks. But time management isn’t really about skills.

With all the time-management tools out there, many people think that time management is a skill, that time management training is skills training. It isn’t.

How many people do you know who don’t know how to enter appointments in a diary? Or use the calendar function of Outlook? My guess is that close to everyone has those skills. But I’ll also hazard a guess that a significant percentage of the people you know have issues with managing time. That is because time management is not about skills.

Time management is about behaviour.

People who manage their time and priorities well do it all the time. It is normal behaviour for them. They may use the various tools available to make them more efficient, but the fundamental key is behaviour.

People who don’t manage their time and priorities well don’t do so because of a lack of skills. They don’t because it isn’t their normal behaviour.

Let me give you a few examples.

I have a friend who is absolutely superb at managing his time and his priorities. He juggles a busy schedule constantly and keeps all his commitments. He doesn’t use his mobile phone or Outlook or any of the high-tech tools out there to do it. He uses a daily planner, just like the one that my father used 50 years ago. It works for him, as well as Outlook, my phone and my CRM software work for me.

Someone else I know is constantly having problems managing time. He can’t seem to ever get things done on time, consistently being late, missing tasks. He uses all the high-tech time-management tools but they simply don’t make much of a difference. Why not? Because his behaviour is that of someone who doesn’t manage his most important resource - himself.

“Time management” is probably a bad label. We aren’t managing time. We’re managing ourselves. It’s resource management and we are the resource. What we are really managing is what we are going to do and when. Yet, many people who can manage other resources have trouble managing themselves as a resource.

I know of many organisations that have run “time management” training. And almost all of them complain that nothing changes. Well, nothing changes because they have run skill training when what they really needed was behavioural change training.

If you expect people to manage themselves as a resource more efficiently, more effectively, you need to train them to change their behaviour. And behavioural change is tough. It’s easy for someone to come back from a workshop and go back to the way they’ve always done things. It’s especially easy if their direct boss doesn’t actively encourage them to make the change.

Of course, for many people, part of their problem with managing themselves is their boss. They get overloaded with delegated tasks and conflicting deadlines. But that isn’t really the problem. The problem is that they don’t say anything.

If I am an IT manager managing a server and the boss says: “I need this done by this time”, I have to consider what the server is already supposed to do, the time required for that and the new task and tell him if that is a realistic possibility or if we need to delay something else, if we need to increase capacity, or if it simply isn’t possible. That server is a resource. Why can’t we do the same thing regarding ourselves as a resource?

The answer is that we can, and we should. The first step is understanding the limitations on ourselves as a resource. What can we do? How fast? What options do we have to improve our efficiency, our output?

We can’t manage a resource effectively without knowing its capabilities and limitations. The same is true of ourselves. Once we know our capabilities and limitations, then we can learn the behaviour that allows us to manage ourselves as a resource effectively.

Any training on managing ourselves as a resource must keep these same goals in mind. Define capabilities and limitations. Invoke behavioural change to manage these resources effectively.Do you have a training question or issue that you would like to see addressed here? Please e-mail me and I’ll see what we can do.

Al Lock is the Business Development and Marketing Consultant for t+b solutions ltd. (http://www.tandbsolutions.com) He can be contacted at al@tandbsolutions.com