A personal approach to organizational time management

October 1, 2019

 

Here is an excerpt from another “classic” article written by Peter Bregman for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Improving the fit between the priorities of managers, their direct reports, and their supervisors—all the way up to the CEO—is a good place to start.

The biggest and most destructive myth in time management is that you can get everything done if only you follow the right system, use the right to-do list, or process your tasks in the right way. That’s a mistake. We live in a time when the uninterrupted stream of information and communication, combined with our unceasing accessibility, means that we could work every single hour of the day and night and still not keep up. For that reason, choosing what we are going to ignore may well represent the most important, most strategic time-management decision of all.To illustrate, let’s look at the experiences of Todd, the head of sales in a large financial-services firm and a direct report to the CEO. Todd had been struggling to change the way people approached the sales process. He wanted more measurement. He wanted people to target prospects that were more likely to bring in higher margins. He wanted people to be more strategic about which prospects to visit versus which simply to call. Finally, he wanted them to be more courageous about pursuing “stretch” prospects where the odds of success were low but the rewards would be high—and more willing to ignore prospects whose accounts weren’t likely to be particularly profitable.“I’ve told them all this multiple times,” Todd said. “I’ve even sat them through a long training. But their behavior isn’t changing. They’re still selling the same old way to the same old prospects.”Todd’s salespeople knew what he wanted from them and were able to do it. They also weren’t lazy; they were working long hours and were working hard. Rather, the problem was that Todd’s salespeople thought they could do it all. That’s why they resisted segmenting their markets or measuring the potential of each prospect before planning a visit: they didn’t want to miss any opportunities. Yet because their time was limited, they ended up missing some of the best.

If this problem bedevils salespeople in organizations like Todd’s, imagine its impact on senior executives. The scope, complexity, and ambiguity of senior leaders’ roles not only create near-infinite permutations of priorities but also make it more difficult to get real-time performance or productivity feedback. Is it any wonder that only 52 percent of 1,500 executives McKinsey surveyed said that the way they spent their time largely matched their organizations’ strategic priorities? (For more on this research, see “Making time management the organization’s priority.”)

We don’t often place organizational problems (such as weak alignment between the priorities of a company’s strategy or poor collaboration among the senior team) in the domain of time management, which is generally seen as an issue for individuals. To meddle with someone’s to-do list or calendar feels like micromanaging. In addition, time management seems too simplistic a solution to a complex organizational challenge.

But in this case, the simplest solution may be the most powerful because most behavior-change challenges are simply about how people are spending their time. That’s precisely where individual time management and organizational time management need to intersect. The question is how. Here’s a straightforward approach.

[Here’s hows to begin.]

Step one: identify up to five things—no more—that you want to focus on for the year. You should spend about 95 percent of your time on those things. Why five things? Why 95 percent of your time? Because getting things done is all about focus. If instead of spending 95 percent of your time on your top five, you spend 80 percent of your time on your top ten, you lose focus and things start falling through the cracks.

As an example, Todd’s five things might include the following:

  1. Clarify and refine the sales strategy for higher margins.
  2. Speak and write to spread the word to higher-margin prospects.
  3. Visit higher-margin prospects and clients.
  4. Develop and motivate a sales team that focuses on higher-margin clients.
  5. Provide cross-silo executive leadership.

Your five things form the structure of your to-do list. Divide a piece of paper into six boxes, five labeled with one of your areas of focus and the sixth labeled “the other 5 percent.” That other-5-percent box is like sugar—a little might be OK, but no more than 5 percent of your day should involve activities that don’t fit into your five areas of annual focus.

Once you’ve defined your six boxes, populate them with the tasks from your overflowing to-do list. If there are tasks—and there will be—that don’t fit into one of your areas of focus, put them in the other-5-percent box. When I first started using a six-box to-do list, half of my tasks fell outside my top five. That changed within a day of using this to-do list as I learned to dismiss and delete the things that were distracting me from my strategic focus. (Of course, if the other-5-percent box is filled with mission-critical tasks that can’t be deleted and will take more than a few hours a week, that suggests your top-five priorities may not be right—a valuable realization.)

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Peter Bregman is the author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (Business Plus, September 2011) and the CEO of Bregman Partners, which advises CEOs and their leadership teams.

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