Page 18 - Time Management

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secretary? It’s just the way things are today. Yes, today’s man-
agers sometimes do have administrative assistants. But very
often, they’re shared among several people. Taming Time 3
So these new ways of doing things eat into the time we once
devoted to the content of our jobs. Like the little razor-toothed
monsters in Stephen King’s The Langoliers, routine responsibili-
ties began eating time.
But there’s good news, too. If our responsibilities have
increased in proportion to the rate of technological progress,
so—in many ways—has our freedom. The same tools that have
made you into your own secretary have also provided you with
ways of organizing data and creating communications that peo-
ple only dreamed about 20 years ago. You can quickly e-mail a
product photo to a prospective client, create a professional
presentation during your lunch hour, and avoid a time-consum-
ing business trip with a simple teleconference.
The new technologies that have blessed us with instanta-
neous communication and limitless access to information,
though, have also brought us the nightmares of even swifter
deadlines and work overload. We’re working longer hours to
manage our increased volume of information and new responsi-
bilities. We’re experiencing new kinds of stress. (How did you
feel the first time you had to format a table with your word pro-
cessing software?) And we’re facing new kinds of time manage-
ment challenges.
For instance, the ubiquitous personal computer—long hailed
as a time-saving device—has sometimes proven to be just the
opposite—a constant demand on our time resources. Voicemail
simplifies our lives in some ways, but complicates them in oth-
ers. Pagers and cell phones keep us in contact with the world
no matter where we are—a decidedly mixed blessing when you
have a romantic evening planned but are expecting an urgent
call. The excuse of being unreachable no longer applies. And a
“paperless society”? Paper manufacturers are making more
money than ever.
The cost of poor time management skills, then, has risen