4 Managing the time available
You will have noticed from the last two sections of this course that time is a very important resource in management, whether you are responsible for managing only your own work or the work of others. Harnessing and allocating time is often a big concern amongst managers in these busy times. While the techniques in the preceding section may help you in planning your time according to the nature of the tasks you have to deal with, the reality is often that new sets of tasks and problems face you daily which add to those you may not already have dealt with. The best way to tackle this situation is to step back from your day-to-day work, look more closely at how you currently manage your time and then devise ways of improving that.
The following four-step process may prove useful:
Step 1: analyse
Analyse how you use your time in a typical day or portion of the day. A simple way to do this is by keeping a log of your daily activities and approximately when you do them. You probably need to do this for three to five working days. If you have a diary with large enough pages you could record your log in it, or you may wish to create a log sheet like Table 1. Please note that this is an example of one person's log of their morning from around 8 a.m. until around 11 a.m. We recognise that your day may be very different from this and that you may need to divide your time differently and that the tasks you record may vary greatly.
| TIME: | DAY: | Tuesday (day 2) |
|---|---|---|
| 8 a.m. | 8.00 | Drop the twins at the child-minder. |
| 8.20 | Arrive at work. Turn on computer. | |
| 8.30 | Make a coffee. Collect mail and distribute to team. | |
| 8.45 | Read emails, answer four immediately. Make note to find information on two more. | |
| 9 a.m. | … | |
| 9.45 | Get out papers for 10am staff meeting and scan them quickly | |
| … | ||
| 10 a.m. | 10.00 | Attend staff meeting |
| … | ||
| 11 a.m. | … |
Step 2: evaluate
Once you have logged your activities, you should then try to evaluate each activity using clear criteria. Some of the following questions may be useful in identifying your criteria:
Is this activity part of my main job role?
Am I efficient and effective in dealing with it?
Does it involve or affect others? How?
Is it an urgent task? Is it an important task?
Do I need more information to deal with it? From whom or where?
This should enable you to see whether you are using your time appropriately and to identify more clearly some of the sources of potential overload, inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
Step 3: change
You should now be more aware of how you spend your time and where there might be some scope for improvement. Having done this, you should spend some time considering the options open to you and decide how you will proceed with any changes needed. Amongst the options you may identify the following:
using your diary or calendars as planning tools
constructing ‘To Do’ lists or checklists to ensure effective task completion
undertake training and development activities to improve your skills in particular aspects of the job
identifying information needs and potential sources of information for the task
shadowing or rotating with other colleagues in your organisation
opportunities to clarify your job role with your manager and what they expect of you as a priority.
Step 4: review
Having taken action to plan and manage your time more proactively, you should make a note in your diary – say in three or four weeks’ time – to review how things are going. Use the criteria you set in Step 2 to help you. Build on what you think went well, e.g. more regular meetings with your manager, more IT training, using planning tools, etc., and reflect on what didn't go so well and why. If there is further room for improvement, you will be better informed for having gone through this process and should be in a position to identify and address it more directly.
Activity 7
The main tasks are divided into producing your log sheet and logging your activities at various points in the day. Allow fifteen minutes for this and a further thirty minutes for doing a brief evaluation report.
Based on your own view, now and in the next week or so, identify a typical working day. On that day, have a go at producing a log of your activities just like that suggested in ‘Step 1: analyse’.
Do the following tasks taken from ‘Step 2: evaluate’ to assess whether you are managing your time appropriately. Leave a line between each answer:
a.Take a blank sheet of paper and at the top write ‘Time Management Report’ for the day and date you did your time log for Question 1. Underline the title you have just written.
b.Write the sub-heading ‘Core Job Role’. Underneath, describe your main job role in no more than two sentences.
c.Write the sub-heading ‘Non-Core Tasks’. Underneath, identify and list, from your time log, any activities which are not part of your main job role.
d.Write the sub-heading ‘Urgent/Important Tasks’. Underneath list separately the ‘urgent’ tasks in your time log and the ‘important’ tasks.
e.Write the sub-heading ‘Unfinished Tasks’. Underneath, identify and list any unfinished tasks in your time log. Write a sentence about each explaining why you think they are unfinished.
f.Write the sub-heading ‘Conclusions’. Underneath, write a list of how you might make improvements in your time management, based on your responses to the above tasks.
Discussion
The four-step approach to time management appears very straightforward, but its success depends on the information you gather and use to analyse your existing practices and how well you evaluate it. Evaluation relies on you being able to ask questions about it which will help you identify where the problems are. This is why we have given you the tasks in question.
This activity has provided you with the opportunity to analyse and evaluate your current time-management practices. You were also asked to put your response to the tasks in a particular format which, like Activity 2 earlier in the course, is a type of brief management report.
Case study: Supply and demand: Part 4 – Kiran's story, three months later
When I look back to that first week at Longheath, I wonder how I coped. Everything seemed to happen at once. I had to prepare lessons for a wide variety of groups, which meant that I was up late most nights preparing materials and lesson plans as they have really tightened up on these from when I was teaching before.
As well as that, I also needed to make arrangements to make sure that there was someone to collect Akaash and Vanita from school and to look after them until I got back home. Rohit's mum was really fantastic. She helped us out a lot but I think they must have missed her at the gurdwara. It was hard work but the planning I did made it, well, manageable. I also had a lot of help from other people both at home and at the school.
By the end of the week, I was beginning to get back into the swing of teaching and teaching is something I have always loved doing. I think that what really made me want to go on was just as I was leaving the school on Friday afternoon, I happened to meet Mrs Jackson in the car park. She asked me how the week had gone. I told her I had enjoyed it. I was delighted when she told me that she had heard very good reports about me from some of the others in the health and social care team. She even added that she hoped I would be able to do more supply work for them in the near future and had said as much to Roger Mannering at the agency. I was so pleased with myself, I couldn’t wait to get home to tell everyone!
After those first few days at Longheath my phone seemed to be always ringing with requests to do supply work. They kept me really busy and at one point I was working in five or six different schools, almost on a regular basis. I did a term and a bit working like this before I began to feel that it was getting a little too much and not really giving me what I wanted in terms of getting to know particular groups of students.
Activity 8
Write a short paragraph of at least four sentences to answer the following question:
Imagine that you are a good friend of Kiran's. Drawing on your reading of Sections 2–4, what advice would you give her in terms of managing the competing demands on her time?
Discussion
This activity provides a useful opportunity to review the ideas we have talked about so far in this course. It also asks you to select some of the ideas you may have found useful and to produce a piece of written advice for Kiran. In order to give you a broader picture of the ideas you could have included in your answer, we have provided two paragraphs below. Remember, however, that you were only asked to write one.
Having achieved her first goal of returning to teaching on a part-time, supply basis, Kiran clearly established a good reputation. Her work is seen as very effective by her ‘customers’, the students and the Head Teacher at Longheath. The long evenings working at lesson plans and preparation are very common for new or returning teachers. It is likely that Kiran is becoming more efficient at this as she builds up a larger stock of useful class activities and teaching notes, and identifies good pre-written materials like textbooks that she can use with her students.
Her good reputation has led to an increased workload, which means that she needs to manage her time better. Perhaps she could analyse her week into a personal timetable and see which of the materials she prepares for one school can be reused in another. This would be a useful unintended outcome of her preparation process. However, it does seem clear that Kiran has taken on a little too much in working for five to six different schools. She needs to identify her goals and priorities now that she has moved three months on. She may need to reduce the number of schools she works for in order to maintain her effectiveness.