The race against time

Some ideas on how to organize yourself so you do what needs to be done, on time.

“Every second of every day you’re faced with a decision that can change your life”-- that’s a rough translation of the tagline of the cult classic German film, Run Lola Run. The film’s protagonist Lola has 20 minutes to deliver some cash to save her boyfriend’s life. While working against a ticking clock may get your adrenaline going, what’s more important is using every minute of the day productively.

The four generations of time management

Best-selling author Stephen R. Covey has examined the dozens of time management theories and approaches that are on offer. From that he has culled four generations of time management:
-The First Generation - Reminders. Followers of this approach limit their time management efforts to keeping lists and notes. These lists are reminders of the order in which tasks are to be completed. Those not completed by the end of the day are transferred in the evening to the next day’s list.
-The Second Generation - Planning and Preparation. Time managers who fall into this category typically go beyond lists and use tools like calendars and appointment books. They note where meetings are held and register deadlines, either on electronic devices or on paper. As compared to the first generation, the second believes in looking farther into the future.
-The Third Generation - Planning, Prioritising and Controlling. Third-generation time managers are different from the first two generations in that they prioritise their activities on a daily basis. They tend to use detailed forms of daily planning on a computer or a paper-based organizer. This approach implies devoting time to considering importance and urgency.
-The Fourth Generation - Efficient and Proactive: Covey’s book First Things First, refers to his own approach as Fourth Generation Time Management. He believes in, one, distinguishing the urgent from the important and, two, stressing the important. To illustrate his advice, he develops the idea of a space of tasks divided into quadrants of importance and urgency (see chart). The fourth generation departs from its predecessors by devoting enough time to the second quadrant, the important-but-not–urgent tasks.

Further time management tools

    There is also the problem of resistance to a task. It is on this problem that the author of The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard, bears down. Whether we want to do a task or not is a key variable in the accomplishment of a task. So Blanchard adopts and modifies Covey’s quadrants by distinguishing tasks that we need to do or not, and tasks that we want to do or not (see chart). People will typically frontload the tasks that they want to do. Blanchard insists on focusing on the have-to-do dimension while side-lining the want-to-do category. Successful managers will focus on the two have-to-do quadrants, and especially the have-to-do but don’t-want-to-do quadrant.

Mark Forster, the UK’s leading time management expert, proposes a useful technique which reinforces Blanchard's confrontation of resistance. It consists of a quick list of resistant tasks and something called Colley’s Rule. Colley was a 19th century mathematician who devised a useful decision-making rule that allows one to make a choice that has a reasonable chance of being a very good one and a weak chance of being a very bad one. The rule states: search until you find an object that satisfies all your criteria; do not choose it; choose the next one that you encounter that is better than the first. Forster applies the rule to the resistant task list in the following manner: take a task on your list; don’t do that one; find the next task on the list that is more resistant and perform that one, instead. In this manner you are guaranteed of performing highly resistant tasks while not having to spend excessive time in trying to figure out which exactly is the most resistant one.
    Tim Ferris, author of the best-selling The Four-Hour Work Week, brings two further well-known rules to bear on the problem of time management. The first is Pareto’s 80/20 rule--Pareto being one of the founders of sociology-- which is used in many areas of management. In its most general formulation the rule states that 80% of the results are generated by just 20% of the effort. You may know the rule under the guise positing that 20% of the customers produce 80% of the profits, or 20% of the products create 80% of inventory-carrying costs. Applied to time management, the rule becomes: 20% of your tasks produce 80% of your results. You now need to spend a little time on determining what those golden 20% are, and making sure that they are not the ones shoved aside. You can also ask yourself how many of the 80% of the tasks that remain are really worth the trouble. Many of them might now be shunted into Covey’s not-important quadrants.
A further problem is posed by a Parkinson’s Law which states that work will take as much time as is available for its completion. Here you need, first, to decide how much time the task is worth, and, second, use a timer to monitor that allotted time. For those with antiquarian leanings and a taste for the passing of time, sand glasses are now available in many different chronological scales (T. & K. Young offer them in increments from 30 seconds to four hours). Managers with more modern tastes, like Mark Forster, prefer mechanical timers. These have coloured (typically red) disks that reduce in size as time elapses. A very small disk quickly tells you that you have very little time left to perform the task. These are also available on CDs for installation for display on your computer screen.

If all this sounds like Latin to you, then hurry up before it's too late and think tempus fugit and carpe diem.