Peter Drucker is one of America’s foremost consultants on business management. He has written over twenty books on the subject, including Managing For Results, The Effective Executive, and Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibility. Since 1971 he has been the Clarke Professor of Social Sciences at the Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California.
Professor Drucker has also done some thinking on the use of management in the local church. He has done consultations on management questions for several religious organizations and has spoken about management and ministry to divinity students at the School of Theology at Claremont.
“Know Thy Time” is an excerpt from Drucker’s book The Effective Executive, published by Harper and Row. It is obviously aimed at a business audience, so not everything applies to local church ministry. But we think that, with some judicious translation and editing, you can distill a lot of valuable information on the stewardship of time for the church leader.
To help with this, we have included here some remarks Professor Drucker gave to students at the School of Theology at Claremont that help put his views on the uniqueness of ministry in perspective.
Most discussions of the executive’s task start with the advice to plan one’s work. This sounds eminently plausible. The only thing wrong with it is that it rarely works. The plans always remain on paper, always remain good intentions. They seldom turn into achievement.
Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process:
• recording time,
• managing time, and
• consolidating time
is the foundation of executive effectiveness.
Recording Time
That one has to record time before one can know where it goes and before, in turn, one can attempt to manage it we have realized for the best part of a century. That is, we have known this in respect to manual work, skilled and unskilled, since scientific management around 1900 began to record the time it takes for a specific piece of manual work to be done. Hardly any country is today so far behind in industrial methods as not to time systematically the operations of manual workers.
We have applied this knowledge to the work where time does not greatly matter; that is, where the difference between time-use and time-waste is primarily efficiency and costs. But we have not applied it to the work that matters increasingly, and that particularly has to cope with time: the work of the knowledge worker and especially of the exective. Here the difference between time-use and timewaste is effectiveness and results.
The first step toward executive effectiveness is therefore to record actual time-use.
The specific method in which the record is put together need not concern us here. There are executives who keep such a time log themselves. Others have their secretaries do it for them. The important thing is that it gets done, and that the record is made in “real” time, that is at the time of the event itself, rather than later on from memory.
A good many effective executives keep such a log continuously and look at it regularly every month. At a minimum, effective executives have the log run on themselves for three to four weeks at a stretch twice a year or so, on a regular schedule. After each such sample, they rethink and rework their schedule. But six months later, they invariably find that they have “drifted” into wasting their time on trivia. Time-use does improve with practice. But only constant efforts at managing time can prevent drifting.
Managing Time
Systematic time management is therefore the next step. One has to find the nonproductive, timewasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can. This requires asking a number of diagnostic questions.
1. First, identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever. To find these time-wastes, ask of all activities in the time records: “What would happen if this were not done at all?” And if the answer is, “Nothing would happen,” then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it.
It is amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed. There are, for instance, the countless speeches, dinners, committee memberships, and directorships which take an unconscionable toll of the time of busy people, which are rarely enjoyed by them or done well by them, but which are endured, year in and year out, as an Egyptian plague ordained from on high. Actually, all one has to do is to learn to say “no” if an activity contributes nothing to one’s own organization, to oneself, or to the organization for which it is to be performed.
2. The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?”
There has been for years a great deal of talk about “delegation” in management. Every manager whatever the organization—business, government, university, or armed service—has been exhorted to be a better “delegator.” In fact, most managers in large organizations have themselves given this sermon and more than once. I have yet to see any results from all this preaching. The reason why no one listens is simple: As usually presented, delegation makes little sense. If it means that somebody else ought to do part of “my work,” it is wrong. One is paid for doing one’s own work. And if it implies, as the usual sermon does, that the laziest manager is the best manager, it is not only nonsense; it is immoral.
But I have never seen an executive confronted with his time record who did not rapidly acquire the habit of pushing at other people everything that he need not do personally. The first look at the time record makes it abundantly clear that there just is not time enough to do the things the executive himself considers important, himself wants to do, and is himself committed to doing. The only way he can get to the important things is by pushing on others anything that can be done by them at all.
A good example is executive travel. Professor C. Northcote Parkinson has pointed out in one of his delightful satires that the quickest way to get rid of an inconvenient superior is to make a world traveler out of him. The jet plane is indeed overrated as a management tool. A great many trips have to be made; but a junior can make most of them. Travel is still a novelty for him. He is still young enough to get a good night’s rest in hotel beds. The junior can take the fatigue-and he will therefore also do a better job than the more experienced, perhaps better trained, but tired superior.
There are also the meetings one attends, even though nothing is going to happen that someone else could not handle. There are the hours spent discussing a document before there is even a first draft that can be discussed. There is, in the research lab, the, time spent by a senior physicist to write a “popular news release on some of his work. Yet there are plenty of people around with enough science to understand what the physicist is trying to say, who can write readable English, where the physicist only speaks higher mathematics. Altogether, an enormous amount of the work being done by executives is work that can easily be done by others, and therefore should be done by others.
“Delegation” as the term is customarily used, is a misunderstanding—is indeed misdirection. But getting rid of anything that can be done by somebody else so that one does not have to delegate but can really get to one’s own work—that is a major improvement in effectiveness.
3. A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes.
There is no one symptom for this. But there is still a simple way to find out. That is to ask other people. Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive.
Many executives know all about these unproductive and unnecessary time demands; yet they are afraid to prune them. They are afraid to cut out something important by mistake. But this mistake, if made, can be speedily corrected. If one prunes too harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.
Every new President of the United States accepts too many invitations at first. Then it dawns on him that he has other work to do and that most of these invitations do not add to his effectiveness. Thereupon, he usually cuts back too sharply and becomes inaccessible. A few weeks or months later, however, he is being told by the press and the radio that he is “losing touch.” Then he usually finds the right balance between being exploited without effectiveness and using public appearances as his national pulpit.
In fact, there is not much risk that an executive will cut back too much. We usually tend to overrate rather than underrate our importance and to conclude that far too many things can only be done by ourselves. Even very effective executives still do a great many unnecessary, unproductive things.
But the best proof that the danger of overpruning is a bugaboo is the extraordinary effectiveness so often attained by severely ill or severely handicapped people.
A good example was Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a dead man for whom every step was torment, he could only work a few hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, “Lord Heart of the Matter” and accomplished more than anyone else in wartime Washington.
This is an extreme, of course. But it illustrates both how much control one can exercise over one’s time if one really tries, and how much of the time-wasters one can cut out without loss of effectiveness.
These three diagnostic questions deal with unproductive and time-consuming activities over which every executive has some control. Every knowledge worker and every executive should ask them. Managers, however, need to be equally concerned with time-loss that results from poor management and deficient organization. Poor management wastes everybody’s time—but above all, it wastes the manager’s time.
1. The first task here is to identify the timewasters which follow from lack of system or foresight. The symptom to look for is the recurrent “crisis,” the crisis that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again.
A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen. It can therefore either be prevented or reduced to a routine which clerks can manage. The definition of a “routine” is that it makes unskilled people without judgment capable of doing what it took neargenius to do before; for a routine puts down in systematic, step-by-step form what a very able man learned in surmounting yesterday’s crisis.
The recurrent crisis is simply a symptom of slovenliness and laziness.
Years ago when I first started out as a consultant, I had to learn how to tell a well-managed industrial plant from a poorly managed one—without any pretense to production knowledge. A wellmanaged plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.
Similarly a well-managed organization is a “dull” organization. The “dramatic” things in such an organization are basic decisions that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up yesterday.
2. Another common time-waster is malorganization. Its symptom is an excess of meetings.
Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization, for one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time. In an ideally designed structure (which in a changing world is of course only a dream) there would be no meetings. Everybody would know what he needs to know to do his job. We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done. We meet because the knowledge and experience needed in a specific situation are not available in one head, but have to be pieced together out of the experience and knowledge of several people.
There will always be more than enough meetings. Organizations will always require so much working together that the attempts of well-meaning behavioral scientists to create opportunities for “cooperation” may be somewhat redundant. But if executives in an organization spend more than a fairly small part of their time in meeting, it is a sure sign of malorganization.
Every meeting generates a host of little follow-up meetings—some formal, some informal, but both stretching out for hours. Meetings, therefore, need to be purposefully directed. An undirected meeting is not just a nuisance; it is a danger.
Consolidating Time
The executive who records and analyzes his time and then attempts to manage it can determine how much he has for his important tasks. How much time is there that is “discretionary,” that is, available for the big tasks that will really make a contribution?
It is not going to be a great deal, no matter how ruthlessly the executive prunes time-wasters.
One of the most accomplished time managers I have ever met was the president of a big bank with whom I worked for two years on top management structure. I saw him once a month for two years. My appointment was always for an hour and a half. The president was always prepared for the sessions—and I soon learned to do my homework too. There was never more than one item on the agenda. But when I had been in there for an hour and twenty minutes, the president would turn to me and say, “Mr. Drucker, I believe you’d better sum up now and outline what we should do next.” And an hour and thirty minutes after I had been ushered into his office, he was at the door shaking my hand and saying good-by.
After this had been going on for about one year, I finally asked him, “Why always an hour and a half?” He answered, “That’s easy. I have found out that my attention span is about an hour and a half. If I work on anyone topic longer than this, I begin to repeat myself. At the same time, I have learned that nothing of importance can really be tackled in much less time. One does not get to the point where one understands what one is talking about.”
During the hour and a half I was in his office every month, there was never a telephone call, and his secretary never stuck her head in the door to announce that an important man wanted to see him urgently. One day I asked him about this. He said, “My secretary has strict instructions not to
put anyone through except the President of the United States and my wife. The President rarely calls-and my wife knows better. Everything else the secretary holds till I have finished. Then I have half an hour in which I return every call and make sure I get every message. I have yet to come across a crisis which could not wait ninety minutes.”
Needless to say, this president accomplished more in this one monthly session than many other and equally able executives get done in a month of meetings.
But even this disciplined man had to resign himself to having at least half his time taken up by things of minor importance and dubious value, things that nonetheless had to be done—the seeing of important customers who just “dropped in,” attendance at meetings which could just as well have proceeded without him; specific decisions on daily problems that should not have reached him but invariably did. Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reason ably certain that he has no idea where his time goes.
Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization—except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.
The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there. The final step in time management is therefore to consolidate the time that record and analysis show as normally available and under the executive’s control. There are a good many ways of doing this. Some people, usually senior men, work at home one day a week; this is a particularly common method of time consolidation for editors or research scientists.
Other men schedule all the operating work-the meetings, reviews, problem-sessions, and so on—for two days a week, for example, Monday and Friday, and set aside the mornings of the remaining days for consistent, continuing work on major issues.
This was how the bank president handled his time. Monday and Friday he had his operating meetings, saw senior executives on current matters, was available to important customers, and so on. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons were left unscheduled-for whatever might come up; and something of course always did, whether urgent personnel problems, a surprise visit by one of the bank’s representatives from abroad or by an important customer, or a trip to Washington. But in the mornings of these three days he scheduled the work on the major matters—in chunks of ninety minutes each.
Another fairly common method is to schedule a daily work period at home in the morning.
One effective executive spends ninety minutes each morning before going to work in a study without telephone at home. Even if this means working very early so as to get to the office on time, it is preferable to the most popular way of getting to the important work: taking it home in the evening and spending three hours after dinner on it. By that time, most executives are too tired to do a good job. Certainly those of middle age or older are better off going to bed earlier and getting up earlier. And the reason why working home nights is so popular is actually its worst feature: It enables an executive to avoid tackling his time and its management during the day.
The method by which one consolidates one’s discretionary time is far less important than the approach. Most people tackle the job by trying to push the secondary, the less productive matters together, thus clearing, so to speak, a free space between them. This does not lead very far, however. One still gives priority in one’s mind and in one’s schedule to the less important things, the things that have to be done even though they contribute little. As a result, any new time pressure is likely to be satisfied at the expense of the discretionary time and of the work that should be done in it. Within a few days or weeks, the entire discretionary time will then be gone again, nibbled away by new crises, new immediacies, new trivia.
Effective executives start out by estimating how much discretionary time they can realistically call their own. Then they set aside continuous time in the appropriate amount. And if they find later that other matters encroach on this reserve, they scrutinize their record again and get rid of some more time demands from less than fully productive activities. They know that, as has been said before, one rarely overprunes.
And all effective executives control their time management perpetually. They not only keep a continuing log and analyze it periodically. They set themselves deadlines for the important activities, based on their judgment of their discretionary time.
One highly effective man I know keeps two such lists—one of the urgent and one of the unpleasant things that have to be done—each with a deadline. When he finds his deadlines slipping, he knows his time is again getting away from him.
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, moreover, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.
“Know Thyself,” the old prescription for wisdom, is almost impossibly difficult for mortal men. But everyone can follow the injunction “Know Thy Time” if he wants to, and be well on the road toward contribution and effectiveness.
Copyright© 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
