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O P I N I O N
Know thy time
To manage time effectively, you need to know – not just believe – you are spending time productively.
R emembering the summer camps from my youth, one particular aspect of those experiences sticks in my memory – the movement of time. At camp, time seemed to stretch out ahead of me, but the days felt as if they were flying by. When Friday and the end of camp rolled around, it simultaneously felt as though I had been there for weeks and that it was over so quickly. How? Could it have been the structure and efficiency of Camp Assurance’s well-organized daily schedule? We ate, slept, and packed a lifetime of exploration and adventure into five short days.
Ted Ryan
I revisit this feeling during a particularly busy and productive week at the office. What is the common denominator? I believe it’s structured time. It happens when I’ve structured my time to do things that matter, purposefully set out to do what matters, and actually accomplish what I’ve set out to do. In one of his many fantastic books, The Effective Executive , Peter Drucker dedicated a chapter to “Know Thy Time.” He recorded countless examples of supervisors, executives, and other knowledge workers – those working with information – spending their time ineffectively.
Drucker quizzed workers about how much time they believed they spent on knowledge work or “primary things.” He had each participant detail their workdays over the course of several weeks and then compared the notes to what they had initially reported. Drucker discovered that there was little correlation between the recorded activity percentages and the time participants believed they were spending on important primary things. Nearly every person had significantly overestimated how much time they spent on primary things. Their time was in fact consumed with less important tasks or “secondary things.”
See TED RYAN, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 19, 2020, ISSUE 1364
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