Tag Archives: management

Time Management – is now the time to get beyond this distracting oxymoron?

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Time management is an extremely popular topic. Is this productive?

A Google search for the phrase “time management” returns the droll news that there are more than 14,900,000 responses. Amazon lists 448 books with ‘time management” in the title or subject line. A similar search on Youtube.com returns over 2,000 videos about time management.

But, what can this really be about? Time is a concept we use to delimit the past from the present, and whatever future there might be. Einstein is reported to have said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” ((I could not find a reference citation for this quote. It is ubiquitous on the web. Perhaps it is apocryphal? In a recent re-read of David Allen’s Getting Things Done Penguin, 2001), he has a side note (p. 5): “Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn’t seem to be working”. – Anonymous )) Perhaps because we, as human beings, are a fleeting moment, we have a special focus on time. We are very aware that our time is limited, unknowable. Continue reading →

Multitasking, Too Much Information, Interruptions, and High Performance

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Last week I ran into a little book (it really is little, 135 pages in a 5″ x 7″ format – very easy on the hand and eye), The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done by David Crenshaw (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco 2008).

The initial chapters take up the question of humans as multitaskers. For those who need to be reassured that the common sense answer to this question is, in this case, more than common, that it really is the sensical answer, take the time to follow the narrative. Yes, this is one of those business books written as a story. In most regards I have come to think of the first such approach that I know of to writing a business book in a narrative story format, The Goal: a process of ongoing improvement, by Goldratt, wishing it had been the last. But, I digress.

Crenshaw introduces the notion that because we really are capable of only one task at a time, the appearance of multitasking is really a series of “switchtasking” in which we shift our attention back and forth among a number of tasks. This process incurs significant inefficiencies due to the housekeeping overhead of our brain keeping track of where we are starting and stopping with each task.  Significant errors also occur as a result.

The proliferation of information devices over the last decade has multiplied the opportunities for interruption and created environments which are perpetually competing for our attention. Email, cellphones, voicemail, instant messaging, text messaging, faxes, and more clutter our desks, pockets, belts, pocketbooks, backpacks, hands, and, ultimately, our brains.  As Crenshaw aptly states, “The reality, though, is that these things will make us productive only if we learn to take control of them….If you and I don’t set up a schedule and protect our time, we allow ourselves to be run over by the traffic of information.” (page 61).

Crenshaw goes on to suggest a strategy for doing just that, establishing a schedule. I have written earlier about the need to avoid Too Much Information.

In Crenshaw’s approach to meetings which calls for establishing “recurring meetings” where people regularly need to meet with you, I think that an opportunity for a deeper understanding of what is happening is missed. The first step with meetings is to examine the reasons for the meetings. Altogether too often meetings are symptoms of poor underlying business processes, especially decision making. Many meetings turn out to be about how a decision is to be made, what information applies, what are the boundary conditions and parameters, and so on. These meetings should be replaced by sound business processes that make the decision making faster, closer to the end user, and more reliable. Other meetings will turn out to be program or process status meetings. These too should be replaced with better business processes and visual status reports. In general a manager should view every meeting where they do not add significant, singular value as a symptom of opportunities to improve processes.

Crenshaw’s approach to developing a time budget seems to me just a re-run of the age old time management gurus’ spreadsheets in which we keep track of all activities for a number of weeks and then analyze them for waste. In my experiences personally, and with clients, this approach does not work well. A significant number of people simply will not maintain a log of their activities in sufficient detail and at enough length to really be useful. More troubling, very few are able to act on the results of the analysis.

I have come to relie on a Seize Your Time approach which I have written and spoken about frequently. Basically, this works as follows:

Take out your schedule for the next week. Block out two hours during which you will post on your door a sign saying, “Do Not Disturb”, turn off all communication devices including your beloved Blackberry (iPhones, too) and work without interruption on some valuable project that will move your organization forward.

You can read more about this in my Time Management postings and podcasts.

One area in which Crenshaw strikes on a rich vein of truth is his discussion of “business systems” and “personal systems”. Here he points out the fact that the “personal system” of the business leader becomes de facto the “business system” of the company.

Many business managers and owners act as though magically their behavior is disconnected from the behavior of their company. They engage in the delusional notion that people throughout their company do not notice how they behave, how they make decisions, what their priorities are, what their values in dealing with people and other companies are, in fact, almost everything they do or say (mostly do).

Fortunately, this is not true. Why “fortunately” you might ask. The answer is that the behavior of the leader of small and medium size businesses has dramatic and reliable impacts on the performance of the company. And, since we do know what constitutes high-performance in business leaders, the leader can learn the appropriate behaviors, actively model them in their own performance, and see the results cascade through their firm.

I applaud Crenshaw for taking on a popular buzzword and small-scale plague not only in business life, but also our day-to-day world. Multitasking is indeed a myth. I would be tempted to be more vigorous in my rhetoric and say that multitasking is a fraud and a thief.


Podcast: Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth

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Shifting your focus from weaknesses to strengths is a powerful step towards being personally more effective and building a more effective organization.

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This podcast is based on an earlier blog posting: “Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth”.

This podcast is 7 minutes 21 seconds long.

You can download a PDF file with the transcript of this podcast

Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth

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The Myth

Managers spend a lot of time worrying about the weaknesses of their employees. “If only I could get her to perform better we would have a really great team.” And countless more along that line. Companies have performance evaluation systems that focus attention on how employees should overcome their weaknesses by additional training, supervision and mentoring, and, above all, more work on self-improvement by the employee. Perhaps this focus on weakness flows from an educational system that has always been more attuned to the “Cs” and “Ds” and what must be done to raise those scores, rather than building on the strengths. Our focus on overcoming weakness is reflected in a saying like, “You can become anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough.”

Debunked

In the management world, Peter Drucker, the great god-father of modern management, spoke clearly about this matter way back in 1966 in his still prescient and useful little book, The Effective Executive (still in print). He wrote, “The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength…. Performance can only be built on strengths. What matters most is the ability to do the assignment.”

More recently, others have also come to see that when it comes to both people and organizations the only way to build for results is to build on strengths. One example of this is the work of the Gallup Organization and Marcus Buckingham and Donald D. Clifton in Now, Discover Your Strengths ( (Free Press, New York 2001) and Tom Rath, Strengths Finder 2.0 (Gallup Press, New York 2007). Go to the website (https://www.strengthsfinder.com/) and check this out.

A Better Approach – Build on Strength

Focusing on strengths engages peoples’ best attributes, skills, and experiences. Focusing on strengths engages people where they have the most passion, energy and success. Focusing on strengths focuses on the activities where people have already demonstrated results. Focusing on strengths creates a positive relationship because you a talking about activities that the employee is good at and has the best chance of producing good results.

Managers should focus their attention on how to be sure that every person is working on their strengths as much as possible.

There is another reason for this focus on strengths, it removes a crutch that managers use to avoid taking complete responsibility for their performance and the performance of the organization – the myth of lousy personnel – “If I only had better people, I could get my organization to really perform.” I wrote about this recently in another posting, It’s Always Your Fault – taking responsibility for your personnel”.

Start With Your Strengths

To move us beyond this discussion, ask yourself:

“What are my strengths?”

The simplest way to answer this question is to look at the activities where you have had the most and best results. These are your strengths. You might enrich this line of thinking by asking which activities make you happy, put you into a state of flow where you really concentrate and loose track of time? An external, third party assessment can be helpful. I have used StrengthsFinder 2.0. It is good, adequate detail without overreaching. There are others.

Then ask this question:

“Am I spending most of my time working on my areas of strength?”

Make a list of your activities over the last two weeks. Do a large number of your strengths play a significant role in many of your day-to-day activities? If there are, great!! If not, you need to take action.

The most important step is to move your work day towards your strengths. Start by asking yourself how you can make changes. Many times my clients find that they are doing tasks out of their strength zones simply because they always have. Habits are made to be changed. Look around the organization to find someone whose strengths include these tasks. Off load them. Keep your eye on the results required, but, off load. Other clients have realized that they need a new employee or business partner to take on the tasks that are in their weak zones.

One of the great side effects of moving to your strengths is that the tasks you shed will be performed better, in a more productive fashion, by somebody who feels good about exercising their strengths in carrying them out.

Look for Strengths in Others

Once you have identified your own strengths and acted to move towards them, you can turn to asking others in your organization, “What are your strengths?”. It is important that you empower them to answer the question for themselves. Then, together, you can act to move them towards their strengths. This is a task requiring more space and time than possible here. A hint is that you will need to build a matrix that displays all of the organization’s primary activities’ strengths requirements on one axis and the strengths of all personnel on the other.

What About The Weaknesses?

OK, so it is true. Everyone has weaknesses. It is true that inevitably these weaknesses show up in the results. The only useful answer to this quandary is the old saying, “Just take your lumps.” Whenever you find a bad result due to someone working in a weakness zone, ask yourself, as the general manager, “Could I have assigned someone else to do that job and have it in their strength zone?”

If you work seriously for yourself and those in your organization to focus on strengths, you will find that the results overall are much better and you and everyone else feels better because they are working in the strength zone.

Meetings – First – Don’t Have Them

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Second in a series on meetings:

No matter where you are in the food chain, meetings are critical to success as a manager. It is important to know how to initiate, lead, and participate in meetings. This series of Management Notes on meetings addresses some basic concepts and skills.

First things first – most meetings should not take place.

Any meeting that is about the status of, or problems with, a regular business process or activity is an indicator that you should solve the process problem. Good processes provide status indicators that can be seen by whomever needs to know, without a meeting. Recurrent problems should be eliminated, not treated as a moment for management to rush in to save the day. If you are in charge of, or have influence over a process that is producing meetings, then take those meetings as a directive for you to get to work on fixing the process.

Now is a good point to note that meetings don’t just take place in conference rooms. When a person in your department stops you in the hallway, or props themselves up outside your doorway, and says, “Can we talk about the Big Bonanza Project?”, you are about to have a meeting. When there is a flurry or emails and instant messages about a project, customer, or whatever, you are having a meeting.

Beware of meetings that you as a manger generate. Ask yourself whether your meetings fall into the categories noted above. Be disciplined about any meeting where the key outcome is to “keep you in the loop”.