Be Strategic about your Time

Publication Date: 
Jan 16

These days, everybody's conscious about costs, and "how to cut costs" is high on everyone's agenda. But have you wondered if you are getting the best return on your investment on your most valuable assets?

In the frantic buzz of most managerial lives, have you seen people running from meeting to meeting, consulting their BlackBerrys as though in prayer, desperately working into the night to cope with a deluge of emails and otherwise being busy, busy, busy? The dilemma of all this activity, however, is that it is for the most part what academics long ago termed "non value-added time."

Years ago, former Harvard Business School professors Steven Wheelwright and Kim Clark (who also served as Dean) documented a catastrophic decline in the amount of value-added time people bring to work once they are assigned to more than two projects. By the time the respondents in their study reported that they were working on 7 projects, their productive time at work dropped to about 15%. Ironically, the more "stuff" one takes on, the less one seems to accomplish.

Value addition when working on multiple projects

So what can you do to get more value-added productivity into your days? A few suggestions:

  • Try to bring old projects to some kind of closure before new ones get on the list
  • Make sure to book some time with yourself for those strategic, but non-urgent tasks (like thinking, or writing) that tend to get crowded out by urgent demands.
  • Match your strategic priorities with how you spend your time - and question activities that don't drive those priorities.
  • And finally, do question the value of every activity - if it simply didn't get done, what would happen?

    • Adapted from an article by Rita McGrath on Discussion Leaders on Harvard Business Publishing