How well are you using your time? Most people have a gut feeling about how well they make use of what time they have. You probably have an idea of your answer. How do you know that it is the right answer? The only way you can be sure is to do a time study. More precisely, I am talking about performing a Drucker Time Analysis. It is named for Peter F. Drucker and comes from his book, The Effective Executive.
For a full week or so, write down everything you have spent time on. This is not as hard or daunting as it sounds on first pass. You most likely already have a calendar with much of your work on it. Start there. If your 1 hour meeting at 2 pm took fifteen minutes longer, adjust the event after the fact. If it took you fifteen minutes to get to the offsite, put “transit” as another appointment.
You can be as specific with the times as you want. I usually mark things in 15-minute increments, but don’t go more detailed than 5 minutes. Any more specific detailed than 5 minutes and you’re spending more time recording what you are doing than doing it. Any greater than fifteen minutes and you are likely losing a lot of good information.
If you don’t trust yourself to remember to record the work in a calendar or on a sheet of paper, set an alarm. Have your phone go off every ten minutes and simply write down what you are doing when it goes off. There are timer apps out there that will go off randomly between every 5 to thirty minutes and give you a more randomized sample.
Once you have a full week written down, you will review it to see what you can learn. You want to capture how you work, not how you think you should be working. Be honest with yourself.
See what jumps out at you. Are you spending too much time on email? Is half your time spent in meetings? Are you doing a lot of surfing on the internet? Write down all your observations; no judging yet. To help with this step you can apply categories to your events. If you are in developer you might choose categories like “coding”, “testing”, “meetings”, and “admin”. A manager may choose categories like “interactions with directs”, “external engagements”, and “my own tasks”. Whatever makes sense to you, go for it. Each time you do this, you will likely choose different categories because of your shifting perspective.
Now that it is all captured, examine how well is your time aligned with your priorities. What are your successes? While it is tempting to go straight to what you can improve on, knowing your strengths is at least as important as knowing your weaknesses. If you find you make most effective use of your time working with customers, you may want to delegate the other stuff and do more of that. It all depends on your current work role and your long-term vision for your career.
Next focus on areas you need to improve on. This is not the areas you can improve on, but need to improve on. You can’t do it all. What areas are you responsible for, but aren’t doing as well as you ought. Perhaps, you are responsible the work of others on a project but spend only three hours a week and aren’t getting the results you need. What are some things you can stop doing? Stopping unproductive activities and giving that time over to ones that get results is a great way to be more effective.
You are your own judge. Be honest; to do otherwise is only cheating yourself. It is helpful to repeat this exercise every so often.
When is the last time you have done a time study? How well is your time aligned with your goals and priorities?
Additional Resources
- The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker
- Manger Tools: Time (Priority) Management