Time Management
Individual Paper Assignment
The Time Management Struggle
The Time Management Struggle Time. There never seems to be enough of it. Most managers experience time management problems that are exacerbated by an increasingly fast pace of life (Hafner, 2010). Throughout my career, I have always believed that next to personnel, time is the most precious resource. While I consider myself a mostly organized non-procrastinator who tends to prioritize tasks, I know that I am not unlike most managers and leaders who struggle with time management. Therefore, it came as little surprise to me that upon receiving feedback from the beginning of the semester class survey that the results revealed my lowest ratings were in the area of time management. My challenges with time management were once again exposed as a result of the Use-of-Time Diary assignment. Although the assignment only tracked three full business days (Jan 23-25) for a total of 72 hours, it indicated that my time was not used productively. This was further underscored by a general feeling of a lack of accomplishment at the end of each work day. In order to achieve greater granularity of the issues surrounding my time management struggle, I decided to extend my use of the time diary assignment for two additional work weeks (Jan 28 – Feb 8). At the end of the two week period, I analyzed the time diary in order to identify those areas that presented the greatest challenges in terms of time management. An analysis of the diary easily indicated that meetings overwhelmingly absorbed most of my time. The diary established that on average nearly 40% of my work days were spent in meetings of which over 80% required my attendance. Furthermore, using the assignment’s 4 point productivity scale ranging from 4 being most productive to 1 being least productive, the meetings averaged a low score of 2.1 points in terms of productivity. More alarming were the notes that I had compiled
The Time Management Struggle
The Time Management Struggle Time. There never seems to be enough of it. Most managers experience time management problems that are exacerbated by an increasingly fast pace of life (Hafner, 2010). Throughout my career, I have always believed that next to personnel, time is the most precious resource. While I consider myself a mostly organized non-procrastinator who tends to prioritize tasks, I know that I am not unlike most managers and leaders who struggle with time management. Therefore, it came as little surprise to me that upon receiving feedback from the beginning of the semester class survey that the results revealed my lowest ratings were in the area of time management. My challenges with time management were once again exposed as a result of the Use-of-Time Diary assignment. Although the assignment only tracked three full business days (Jan 23-25) for a total of 72 hours, it indicated that my time was not used productively. This was further underscored by a general feeling of a lack of accomplishment at the end of each work day. In order to achieve greater granularity of the issues surrounding my time management struggle, I decided to extend my use of the time diary assignment for two additional work weeks (Jan 28 – Feb 8). At the end of the two week period, I analyzed the time diary in order to identify those areas that presented the greatest challenges in terms of time management. An analysis of the diary easily indicated that meetings overwhelmingly absorbed most of my time. The diary established that on average nearly 40% of my work days were spent in meetings of which over 80% required my attendance. Furthermore, using the assignment’s 4 point productivity scale ranging from 4 being most productive to 1 being least productive, the meetings averaged a low score of 2.1 points in terms of productivity. More alarming were the notes that I had compiled
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