by Lee Fried, on 21 Feb 2007 06:30 pm
The Journey
Managing Time
Before I left for vacation I had a coaching session with a senior leader in the organization. The topic of the session was how to manage time with so many competing priorities. Being one of the leaders in the Model Line area this leader has had a very hard time balancing the demands of the “new” and “old” worlds. This leader understands the importance of being highly involved in the development of her staff, spending time in the Gemba, conducting route cause analysis, etc. Yet, she is feeling overwhelmed, because she still needs to work within the context of the broader organization that has not been exposed to Lean principles. An organization that requires leaders to spend much of their time in countless meetings coordinating work across departments. During the meeting she commented to me that when we first started with the Model Line she was highly skeptical that Lean would change the way that she does her work and considered it merely a process improvement technique to improve operations. Six months later she is excited and fully committed to abandoning twenty years of “traditional” business education in order to behave and perform as a “Lean” leader if only others would tolerate the changes she needs to make. At the conclusion of the session we decided to treat this problem like any other and to start gathering data. Her first step was to look backwards a month and forwards a month on her colander and to begin categorizing where she is spending her time and for what purpose. That way she could make a better case to key stakeholders on why she should or should not participate in an event, meeting or other engagement. Today, I ran into her and asked her how it was going and she told me that she felt much better. She said the exercise of gathering the data forced her to reflect on what activities were really value-added. She said that she was surprised by how much time she wastes on a weekly basis and was able to come up with some simple strategies that she thought would make a big difference. For example, she was able to move required meeting’s to the same day and location so that scheduling would be easier and travel time would be less. Additionally, she was able to identify several standing meetings that at one point made sense for her to attend, but there was no longer any reason. She said it was embarrassing to her that she was not able to identify this earlier, but was so caught up in the motions that she never questioned why. I am sure that anyone that works in a large organization can relate. Based on this leaders experience I have decided to do the same thing with my calendar. I wonder how much stuff I can simple stop doing with no negative impact. My guess is a lot.
on 24 Feb 2007 at 1:57 am 1.robert thompson said …
Sounds like you need to apply the principles of Getting Things Done by Dave Allen. Allen’s philosophy is that to be one’s most productive self, one must be able to think clearly and to do this one must have completely downloaded from one’s short-term memory or all the “open loops”: unfulfilled commitments one has made to oneself. This frees the mind to do naturally what it does best: think about things rather than of things. Once one has everything off his mind and written down, in paper or electronically, one has to decide, “What’s the next action?” This is THE critical question. Once this is decided, the action must be completed or tracked in a trusted system, such as a PDA.
Rob
http://www.rob-thompson.net
http://www.63buckets.co.uk (lean)
http://www.qualityhero.co.uk (six sigma)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertthompson