Page 26 - Time Management

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Taming Time
• How can I, by example or persuasion, help them grow
into better, more time-managed individuals?
If you can identify the ways in which your ability to manage
your time is impacted by the behavior of others, it’s possible
that you can find ways of either changing the behavior of the
other person or changing the impact it has on your own life.
Even an adjustment in how you view the other person’s behav-
ior can change the way in which that behavior affects you.
Where Do the Hours Go?

How many hours do you spend a week watching TV? During
which hour do you receive the most phone calls at work? How
much reading do you do weekly? Think out your answers
before reading ahead.
If you’re an average American, each week you watch
TV for 25 hours, read for
just under three hours, and
When to Call?
receive the most phone
Many time management
calls between 10 and 11
experts advise setting aside
a.m. a specific hour each day to make and
Do these figures match return phone calls. And the very best
your time utilization? If not, times to do that are either in the first
is it because you are not two hours of the morning or in the
typical, or because you last two hours of the afternoon.
That’s when you’ll find most people in
under- or overestimated?
the office and most readily accessible
Most people have a
by telephone. (If you make calls
poorly defined sense of
across multiple time zones, of course,
how they spend their time. you’ll need to factor in the time dif-
Even if you have a good ference.)
sense of how you allocate
your time, an inventory of how much time you spend doing var-
ious activities may reveal a surprise or two. A very useful diag-
nostic exercise would be to carry a small notebook with you for
a few days and jot down your activities, indicating the time it
took you to do each thing. You might want to do this just for