Over the last 4 years, we have done 67 People or Process events and overwhelmingly the biggest issue is Time Management.
In my last blog I recalled the summers on the farm when I would avoid the chore of cleaning the manure out of the calf stalls. And how finally my dad said, “You always have time to do what you really want to do”. So how do we balance what we need to do with what we want to do?
Years later when I became a manufacturing engineer at Chevy, the folks on the floor asked me to complete 10 – 20 tasks a day. At first I tried to remember them all and would work on the hottest, or the highest priority item. In weeks I realized there were far too many to remember, so I started a list. Very soon I had hundreds of action items on my list. I tried to think about how to prioritize…obviously, those items my boss asked me to do were the hottest. But, I had hundreds of others things to do and some of them felt like cleaning manure…
I tried prioritizing the list based on consequences and rewards ie. Safety, Scrap, Machine Uptime, etc. I assigned a number to each action item. This was a huge calculation mess (pre-Excel).
A senior engineer setting next to me shared with me his method for prioritizing. He had categories for all his tasks. There were the A Boss items, the D drawer items (been asked for once), the C drawer items (asked for twice) and the B drawer items (asked for three times). Every month he would throw away the D drawer and move the C drawer down to D, etc.
For years I was a big believer in the A, B, C and D drawer process with the Boss items as a priority. The A items went on my daily things to do list – my Things To Do (TTD) list was born!
Now that I have my own business I realize that I make up the Boss list. And I realize that we should be the Boss of our own list. Now I start my list with a mixture of my affirmations or 20-year goals and link my TTD to these affirmations and goals. I find the time to do what I need to and what I want to do. We have developed some wonderful Time Management tools that we not only use but also would be glad to share with you. If crossing those A items off the list is a problem, call us, we’ve got time to help you manage yours!