Convenience

Chapter 1:
Understanding the Manager’s Job
2 5
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BUILDING EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT SKILLS
Exercise Overview
Time management skills
refer to the ability to prioritize
tasks, to work efficiently, and to delegate appropriately.
This exercise allows you to assess your own current
time management skills and to gather some suggestions
for how you can improve in this area.
Exercise Background
As we saw in this chapter, effective managers must be
prepared to switch back and forth among the four basic
activities in the management process. They must also
be able to fulfill a number of different roles in their
organizations, and they must exercise various manage-
rial skills in doing so. On top of everything else, their
schedules are busy and full of tasks—personal and job-
related activities that require them to “switch gears”
frequently throughout the workday.
Stephen Covey, a management consultant and the
author of
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
, has
developed a system for prioritizing tasks. First, he
divides them into two categories—urgent and critical.
Urgent
tasks, such as those with approaching deadlines,
must be performed right away.
Critical
tasks are tasks
of high importance—say, those that will affect signifi-
cant areas of one’s life or work. Next, Covey plots both
types of tasks on a grid with four quadrants: A task
may be
urgent
,
critical
,
urgent and critical
, or
not urgent
and not critical
.
Most managers, says Covey, spend too much time
on tasks that are
urgent
when in fact they should be
focused on tasks that are
critical
. He observes, for
example, that managers who concentrate on urgent
tasks meet their deadlines but tend to neglect critical
areas such as long-term planning. (Unfortunately, the
same people are also prone to neglect critical areas of
their personal lives.) In short, effective managers must
learn to balance the demands of urgent tasks with those
of critical tasks by redistributing the amount of time
devoted to each type.