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TIME MANAGEMENT
by Dr. Ben S. Graham, Jr.
The Ben Graham Corporation
© The Ben Graham Corporation, 1996
Permission is granted to post, print and distribute this document in its
original PDF format.
Everyone has the same twenty-four hours each day, yet some people
accomplish many times more than might be considered normal.
Surprisingly, these people often appear calm and unhurried. Without
driving themselves, they have mastered the art of managing their most
valuable resource, their time. They have arrived at constructive
attitudes and have polished skills for making the most of their time.
This session includes a discussion of the psychology and the techniques
of time management.
The Psychology of Time Management
It is one thing to learn a technique and apply it diligently. It is
quite another to understand why a technique works and be able to apply
it creatively. This presentation offers a couple of techniques for
making better use of time but first it covers why these techniques work.
Unfortunately, our minds invite misunderstandings about time that
interfere with our making the best use of it. This discussion of the
psychology of time management is intended to clarify these
misunderstandings and prepare us to become the masters of our time.
Doing Everything We Have the Chance to Do
People develop their first notions of time early in life when there is
relatively little that they can do. It is natural for parents to
restrain young children to protect them from getting into things that
would be dangerous and this, of course restricts the number of things
they can do. As young children begin to learn about minutes, hours and
days, time seems long. And, time seems sufficient to do all the things
that they are allowed and able to do. It is not at all unusual for
youngsters to want to do more things and for parents to keep restraining
them.
Increasing Pressure on Time
Having enough time to do everything that we have a chance to do
continues through childhood for most children. However, the number of
things that they are able to do and allowed to do steadily increases.
The amount of time that we have for doing things does not increase. The
twenty-four hours that was ample for doing everything for the youngster
never gets any longer. By the time young people reach early adolescence
most of them begin to find that they want to do more things than they
have time to do.
For instance, in elementary school all of the children take all of
the same subjects. When they leave the class-room for recess in the
school yard they are all apt to play the same games. Then when they
reach junior high school they find that there are more classes than
anyone is able to take. Perhaps they will choose between a trade program
or a college preparatory program. Will they take a language? Which
language will it be? They can't take both art and music. Which will it
be?. After school, in the afternoons, there are other choices. Will the
get involved in school clubs? Will they try out for sports? Will they
hang around - with whom, - where - smoke pot - get involved in church
activities? They are faced with many decisions. How they face these
decisions determines their success with the identity crisis of
adolescence.
The key to this identity crisis is the decision-making. However,
facing up to the idea that we can't do everything is uncomfortable and
some people have a lot of trouble with it. As time marches on they do
not decide. They promise themselves that someday they will do this and
do that and go to all the different places, etc. Rather than making up
their minds they waste their time while they carry psychological baggage
that includes all of the things they will get around to doing someday.
This is a much greater problem for people as we approach the
twenty-first century than it was for people in prior generations because
there are so many things available for us to do today that were not
available then. Television was not available when our grandparents were
children and is now available in so many channels that the impossibility
of watching them all is obvious. And, television is just a part of the
vast array of entertainment that is available. Magazines and books are
available on almost every subject. Everywhere we turn there are people
telling us we should get involved in this exercise program or join this
time-sharing program, attend this professional meeting, get involved in
these "do-it-yourself" projects, or another hobby, some
totally worthwhile cause that needs our involvement, and on it goes. No
population has ever been so barraged with enticements to do so many
things as we are today.
And, still there are people trying to do it all. They subscribe to
magazines that they do not read and then when the renewal notice arrives
they sign up again. Heaven forbid that they should miss an issue that
they will stack up and not read.
At the heart of this issue of increasing pressure on time is the
obvious need to make choices. But, this is only a part of the
fascinating subject of mastering our time. Next we will deal with the
elasticity of time.
Elasticity of Time
Scientists and engineers have gone to great lengths to provide us with
instruments that measure time with extreme precision. Every minute is
exactly the same as every other minute. However, as we experience time
the minutes are not all the same. Some minutes seem to take forever and
some seem to flash by. The key to understanding the elasticity of time
is interest. The more interested we are in what is happening, the faster
time seems to pass. Conversely, the more disinterested we are, the more
time seems to drag.
Most people have personally experienced this relationship between
interest and the passage of time. They know what it is like to be doing
something that has them so involved that they are suddenly shocked at
what time it has gotten to be. They also know how frustrating it is to
wait, to stand in line doing nothing. In fact, they know the irritation
they experience when someone cuts into the line. Waiting can seem to
take so long that it tries our patience. Then when someone adds to the
wait, patience may run out. More than one person has flown off the
handle in this situation.
Most people also know what it is like to be sitting in an audience
listening to something that is totally boring. How, long it seems to
take. "Will this never end?" Meanwhile, someone else in that
same audience may be very interested in the subject. The person who is
interested may wish the speaker would slow down and repeat something
again and if he does the person who is bored will be thinking, "Oh
no! He's saying it again! He's said that three times already and I
wasn't interested in the first place." Suffice it to say that all
minutes contain the same amount of time but the same minute may seem
totally different to two different people depending on their interest.
Selective Memory
The elasticity of time would be of little interest to the subject of
time management except that it is directly related to memory Memory in
turn sets the stage for the time trap that steals our time. Here is how
that works.
The less involved we are with any given activity the slower the time
seems to pass. Ironically, The slower the time passes the less we will
remember it. The more bored we become the less energy we give to the
task and the less brain work we do building the linkages that will
enable us to get back to that experience again.
Conversely, the more involved we are with any experience the more
energy we expend on the brain work that enables us to relive that
experience over and over again even many years later. For instance, most
people can remember small details about particular experiences such as a
graduation day, a wedding day, the birth of a child, attending a super
bowl game, being in an automobile accident, the loss of a loved one,
etc. What all of these activities have in common is that they had us
intensely involved.
One experience that can be used to illustrate this point for many
people is the assassination of President Kennedy. Many people remember,
with exact detail, where they were when they heard about it, what they
thought, what happened next and on through the events that followed over
the four days. Even though this occurred over thirty years ago, many
people can still remember it much more vividly than they remember what
happened thirty days ago.
As a matter of fact, there is a detail associated with the Kennedy
assassination that is quite unique and can help us to understand this
relationship of involvement with memory on an even higher plane. It goes
like this. In the United States there are many suicides every day. It is
a big country and therefore every day forty or fifty, or a hundred
people decide to kill themselves. We simply do not have days when nobody
commits suicide. But we did! In November of 1963 we not only had a day
with no suicides, we had four consecutive days with no suicide and they
were the same four days that we associate with the Kennedy
assassination. Coincidence. Not a chance! No one did themselves in
during those four days for the same reason that so many people can
remember those days so clearly today. We were involved. We were doing
what human beings are supposed to do. We were intensely involved, fully
alive and using our faculties as they are designed to be used.
For the moment this is a discussion of memory and it seems
appropriate to digress briefly on this important subject. Most people
would like to be able to remember well and perhaps, to improve their
memories. There is a very simple way to improve your memory. It is to
get excited about your life. If you find yourself bored with your life
do something about it. If your find yourself going through the motions
of living cut it out! Dig into your life. Dig into your job. Whatever
you are doing, do it with zest. And, if you find yourself at a dead end
after giving it your best effort, then make a critical decision to
change where you are. But, what ever you do, live your life. Be alive,
be excited and you will find that you will remember.
The Theft of Time
Because we remember the things we are highly involved with and do not
remember the things that bore us, our memories are comfortable. The
activities that we remember were important. The time we wasted we do not
recall. This can help us to feel good about ourselves but it also
enables us to squander our lives without realizing it. It is as though
we are being robbed of the most valuable asset we have, the time of our
lives, and we don't even know it is happening.
Summary of the Psychology of Time Management
First, we need to realize that we cannot do everything. Certainly people
can be involved in a wide variety of activities and still live highly
effective lives but they must make decisions that give a central course
to their lives and they must keep getting back to that course. Then It
helps to realize that our memories play tricks on us as we remember our
actions as being more important than they really are. Once we have these
two thoughts well in mind we should be ready to try out some of the
techniques of time management. And, if we do it well, we may become the
masters of our time.
Techniques of Time Management
The A B C Approach
Developed by Don Schoeller at the Wharton School during the 40s and 50s,
The ABC Approach to Time Management operates as follows. First you list
the things that you do with your time. Then you sort them into highly
valuable, "A", intermediate value, "B" and low
value, "C". Then keep track of your time for a day or so. Then
total up the amount of time that you spent involved with activities of
each of the three categories. Don Schoeller worked with managers and
engineers in his classes in the extension program at the Wharton School.
When they collected this data they found that they were invariably
spending more time on class "C" activities than they thought
they were and considerably less time on class "A" activities.
Don assembled data that showed that these managers and engineers were
spending about fifteen percent of their time on their valuable
activities, twenty percent on the intermediate activities and around
sixty-five percent on low value activities. If this is the case, then it
is easy to see how a person could double the time spent on valuable
activities and still be using only thirty percent of his or her time on
them. Why not go ahead and double it again. As for the low value
activities. Many of them simply aren't worth doing. Those low value
activities that must be done merit study to find the fastest and easiest
way of doing them so that our time can be freed up for more valuable
activities.
This is, essentially, the Work Simplification approach that attacks
time-consuming tasks in order to free up time for more valuable
accomplishments. It also helps to explain how it is that some people get
so much done in their lives while others, in the same amount of time
with similar opportunities accomplish so little.
Work Distribution Charting
This technique is an adaptation of the ABC Approach for use with a group
of people who work together. First they make a list of their activities,
making sure that they all break down the work into the same sorts of
activities. Then they keep track of their time for a day or two and they
total the time spent on each activity. Then one of them prepares a
spread sheet listing the people across the top and the activities down
the side. In the intersections they post the total time that each person
spent on each activity. When they total horizontally, across the spread
sheet, they can see how much time they have spent as a group on each
activity.
This information is usually unavailable for two reasons. First, as
individuals they cannot remember how much time they spent on each
activity and second, even if they did, they would not be able to
remember how much time the other people spent on each activity.
Once this information is available, there may be some surprises.
Often, low value activities are found to be tying up far more time than
they are worth and this puts a challenge before the group to figure out
how reduce that time. Sometimes reports can be discontinued. It helps to
convert the time to dollars' worth of time and put a price on the
report. Is it worth it? And, it should be understood that if the report
is discontinued it will not mean that that amount of money will be
saved. It will mean that that amount of time will be made available for
more valuable activities.
Summary
Time is our most valuable asset! Yet an enormous amount of it is
squandered. (And, the squandering is based on the values of the person
who is wasting the time, not on the values of someone else.) We waste
our time partly because we tend to think we have more time than we do
and partly because we don't remember the time we waste. It helps to let
a clock tell us how much time we are spending on our different
activities. The nice thing about using a clock is that it is objective.
It does not care whether we are doing the most important thing in our
life or absolute trivia, it counts each minute the same. Then each of us
needs to make decisions about what we want to do with our time and get
on with living and mastering our lives. |
