The Activity Illusion by Ian Price

Author:Ian Price [ PRICE, IAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848769496
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

Time Management

If we are working in a frenzied, hyperactive environment, it is all too easy to attribute our failure to complete important tasks and to deliver our objectives on the lack of time. It is equally easy to look to time management as a solution to this issue. This would be a mistake.

Firstly, when we identify time – or lack of it – as the root of our problems, we are identifying an abstract notion and attaching to it a causal relationship with all of our difficulties. It is not time that is our problem; rather it is all the unproductive, inefficient and unnecessary activity with which we fill it.

I was given a graphic illustration of this when I was lucky enough to watch a group of eleven highly intelligent and ambitious MBA students perform a simple and brief outdoor team exercise in 20 minutes. In their eagerness to complete the exercise in record time, they launched straight into it under the de facto leadership of the group’s alpha male... and performed lamentably. Having made a disaster of the first attempt, they had plenty of time and made a second one which was fractionally better. In all, they were able to make seven attempts. They were naturally disappointed when told at the end that their best time was poorer than that achieved by a group of primary school children a week earlier. The fact was that they had given themselves no time to discuss different ways of approaching the task and had only chanced upon the optimal way of completing it towards the very end when it was too late. Five minutes of planning and discussion at the outset might have secured a different outcome altogether. When the self-appointed leader was asked to reflect upon why they had performed so poorly, in spite of having had seven attempts at the task, his analysis was: “ We ran out of time.”

The route to effectiveness is not through managing time any differently. Instead, it is about thinking very carefully about the way in which we approach tasks so that not only do we cut out unimportant activity, but that we also think and plan hard as we approach the important activity that remains. Much inefficiency and urgent activity within organisations is the “cost of failure” resulting from not doing something correctly first time. Failure is more likely to happen in an environment of frenzied hyperactivity when the task in question is being juggled with innumerable others and when key people are hurried, stressed and operating with impaired cognitive ability and short-term memory.

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