Slicing your time pie

By Tom Wagner

The time you spend on daily activities should reflect your priorities. However, we often let a gap occur between our goals and how we actually spend our time. 

For example, a 2004 survey conducted by the Gail Kasper Consulting Group revealed that 99% of adult respondents felt they needed to improve their lives and careers, but only 9% were actively doing something about it. The survey went on to report that half of the 9% did not achieve their commitments because they didn’t have a structure or system to support them. 

This article describes a structure to help manage time so you can stay focused and achieve important goals.

A gap between stated priorities and actual execution is commonplace in business, and is especially dangerous for a leader. No one else in the organization can fully compensate for a boss who routinely fails to accomplish important goals because he is distracted by urgent, but relatively trivial, matters. Leaders can stay better focused on their most vital issues by using a schedule that forces them to pay attention to goals. This is called schedule management, and visualizing a “time pie” for the leader illustrates this technique.

Time pie example. First, be mindful that simplicity is important because complicated systems are hard to manage. Begin with four work activity categories that are appropriate for your job. I’m using a CEO job for this example, but the concept works for any management level.

The following time pie allocates 60% of the leader’s time to operations and communications. The dividing line between these two categories is sometimes indistinct, but that’s not a problem if the overall balance is maintained. 

Operations and communications activities are mostly about the present – serving customers and other routine business functions.

The remaining 40% of the time pie is focused on the future: growing the capacity of employees, developing more efficient ways to carry out work, and expanding into new markets. 

30% Operations: Finance, measuring results, employee issues, project and customer issues, and budgets. This is the routine stuff that’s important enough to merit CEO involvement.  The challenge is for the CEO to delegate appropriate tasks to competent managers, who will then attend to the details and keep the boss aware of important issues. 

30% Communication: Robust internal and external communication. Poor internal communication is a common complaint from people at all levels of organizations, and the leader has a unique responsibility to relentlessly press home the company’s message.  The content of the internally-directed message varies, but should always include the following:

• Our mission, what values we stand for, and how we should behave

• Defining or, more commonly, reminding everyone what project or goal is most important now.  As this information filters down the chain of command, employees at every level should be able to answer the question, “What must I personally accomplish by the end of my work here today?”

• On an individual employee level, what opportunities exist for me here

The ultimate objective of internal communication is creating “commonunity” – a sense that we’re in this together. Do this by visiting with employees and sharing news of struggles and triumphs and spreading the vision.  Remember, there can only be one “keeper of the vision.” 

20% Mentoring and succession planning: This includes employee development, coaching, and finding, hiring, and retaining top talent. Employee development includes formal training, rotation among different job functions and other activities to help employees learn to do things for themselves so they grow stronger, more autonomous and more likely to become mentors to others. Employee development is becoming especially urgent in our geographic area because shortages of skilled workers require companies to develop existing employees to support business growth. 

20% Thinking: This time pie slice is not solving problems or fixing things, but is instead reflection, reading, researching new ideas, thinking about future possibilities and developing your intuition.  Exploiting new technologies, developing new services/products, or entering new markets fall within this category.  As companies grow and the management team becomes more capable, the relative size of this slice should increase.

Setting up and managing your time pie. Begin using schedule management by selecting your top five or six activities in each of the four major time pie categories. Next, use a time budget built on the total hours worked each week to create a monthly work schedule, by day and time, for core recurring activities. 

This is the secret to success – establishing routine times for key activities preserves focus and increases efficiency. For example, scheduled meetings with key subordinates ensure routine communication of all issues, not just the current emergency.  Non-urgent issues should be saved for discussion at these meetings, reducing interruptions during the day.  Also schedule blocks of time for undisturbed work, when you will not be interrupted by calls or other routine matters. Both of these techniques boost efficiency – the leader’s and that of key subordinates.

Reducing the leader’s time spent on ad hoc meetings and handling routine questions has benefits beyond the obvious.  Many problems that seem urgent at the moment are often resolved without the leader’s involvement. 

Finally, reviewing your time pie may reveal the need to restructure responsibilities. The “reverse delegation” syndrome often shifts to the leader issues that should be resolved by others. 

I routinely remind CEOs, “Even if you can do everything better than anyone else, there is only one of you and many of them.” The leader’s time is limited and should be preserved for those tasks only the boss can accomplish.