Achieving Objectives Through Time Management

Institute of Leadership & Management

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781138172623
• eBook ISBN: 9781136431258
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Super series are a set of workbooks to accompany the flexible learning programme specifically designed and developed by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) to support their Level 3 Certificate in First Line Management. The learning content is also closely aligned to the Level 3 S/NVQ in Management. The series consists of 35 workbooks. Each book will map on to a course unit (35 books/units).

Session B
Deciding how to use time

1 Introduction

Most first line managers probably feel they have too many things to do. How is it possible to know how to apportion time appropriately? Is it best to do the easy things first, or the important things, or the urgent things? How can we decide?

‘Dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of’. – Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (1757).

In this session of the workbook, we’ll start by looking at the decision process itself. Next, briefly, the subject will be ‘timing’ rather than ‘time’, for it’s important to get the timing of a decision right.

We will then go on to examine the typical demands made on our time and who makes them.

After that the discussion turns to habits – good ones and bad ones.

The rest of this session is devoted to a clever device called a time management grid, which should help you decide just how urgent and important a particular job is.

2 Making decisions

The responsibility for making decisions is a key feature of management. But what do we really mean by a ‘decision’?

Activity 11

How would you explain the word ‘decision’ to someone who hasn’t heard it before?

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A decision can be defined as:

■ a choice between options;

■ what happens when someone picks up one option rather than other options;

■ a selection of one thing, or a preference for one thing, over another.

When someone makes a decision, they are choosing between two or more options.

Why is this important to effective time management?

‘More than any other time in history, mankind faces a cross-roads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.’ – Woody Allen.

The reason is that we all have choices about how to spend our time, so it’s sensible to think about the process of selecting the best options.

As a manager, you will certainly be familiar with the decision-making process. You probably have to make decisions every hour of every day – big decisions and small decisions.

By analysing the way that decisions are made, it’s possible to identify a series of stages in the process, although sometimes these stages are passed through so quickly we may be hardly aware of them.

Activity 12

Suppose you are a first line manager in a warehouse. You’ve been instructed by your manager to keep overtime to an absolute minimum. On Thursday morning you are given a large order which you are told by the sales department must be picked and packed by Monday. You know you can’t finish the job in time without overtime working. Your manager is away and won’t be back until Friday.

You could organize some overtime for Thursday and Friday and risk your manager being annoyed that his instructions were ignored. Or you could leave a decision until he gets back and ask him to authorize weekend working. Weekend working would cost the company more money than weekday overtime.

One way or another you have to make a decision.

Jot down the stages by which you would come to a decision. What you decide isn’t so important for the purposes of this exercise; it’s the stages which your thinking would go through before you carried out your decision that we’re interested in.

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One way to list the stages of decision-making is shown below. Don’t worry if you described a different approach – there are no hard-and-fast rules about this. The method described is a useful one, though.

■ It is useful to begin by making sure you have all the correct information available. For the case described in the Activity, you might ask such questions as:

■ Do sales really need the order in full by Monday? Is a part shipment possible?

■ What exactly were the manager’s instructions?

■ Are there members of your team available to work either on Thursday and Friday or at the weekend?

■ Is it possible to contact the manager?

■ At this first stage we are gathering facts and making sure they’re correct. A good name for this stage is the knowledge stage.

Tip: Defining your objectives is vital. If you aren’t sure what your problem is, you’ll be fortunate to solve it at all.

■ Once you’ve gathered and checked all the information available, it’s important to decide what exactly the problem is. We can call this the objectives stage. In it you are asking:

■ What am I trying to achieve?

■ (We’ll look at how to set objectives later in this session.)

■ Next comes the alternatives stage. Here you are asking:

■ Given the facts available, and knowing what I’m trying to achieve, what are the choices open to me?

■ The next stage can be called the look ahead stage. The questions here are:

■ How would these alternatives work out?

■ How far would they go to meeting my objectives?

■ What would be the costs (financial and otherwise) of adopting each alternative?

■ The final stage is the action stage.

■ This is when you make a choice between your alternatives, put it into practice and see how it works out.

■ In summary, the stages of decision-making we have identified are:

■ K nowledge

■ O bjectives

■ A lternatives

■ L ook ahead

■ A ction

Koalas aren’t particularly known for their decisiveness, but they could be said to stick to their decisions. They sleep by curling up on the branches of trees, grasping them firmly with their feet, and will not release their grip, even when mortally wounded.

■ The initial letters of these stages spell the word KOALA. (A koala is the name of a small Australian marsupial that eats the leaves of eucalyptus trees.)

So much for the decision-making process. What about the timing of decisions?

2.1 Timing it right

While t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series preface
• Unit specification
• Workbook introduction
• Session A. Where does all the time go?
• Session B. Deciding how to use time
• Session C. Making time work
• Session D. The limitations of time management
• Performance checks
• Reflect and review