Notes

Corporations sometimes hire consultants to help their employees better use their time on the job. But before recommendations can be made about areas of improvement, a determination about how time is now being spent is necessary. Therefore, the consultant may peek over a person’s shoulder every day for a week, recording exactly what is done in each quarter-hour segment of the day.
The results of these observations are always surprising to the person being watched. Often an executive who prides herself on efficiency will learn from such a study that she just reshuffles papers on her desk for two hours a day or spends eight hours a week searching for information in files that aren’t properly organized. When such things are pointed out, procedures can be changed so that, for the same amount of time used and energy expended, more work gets done. Such simple time studies have saved corporations millions of work hours and billions of dollars.
You can learn about your own time use without hiring someone to watch you all week. You can watch yourself. The time study just described has three phases:

Observation
Analysis
Planning
Phase one, observation, is where you watch yourself, and plot out by the hour how you spend your time. First, on a sheet of paper, mark a column for each day of the week. Down the left margin, write the hours of the day from your wake-up time to bedtime. Then, as well as you can remember, fill in how you spent last week—if it was a typical week—or at least the last few days. If you find it too hard to list what you’ve done over the past week and want to be a little more accurate, you can start today to keep your record for the coming week.

After you take away time for school and sleep, these observations will help you determine where the rest of your week goes. Of the 168 hours in a week, sleep may take about 60, and, if you’re a student, class time and travel time to and from school 40 hours, leaving 68 hours. From that, subtract grooming, eating, family time, and church, and you may have somewhere between 20 to 40 hours left. These are your discretionary hours, the ones you have the most choice about. Observe them closely!

Now that you’ve observed how your time is used, you are ready to begin phase two, the analysis stage, where you decide if the way your time is spent is how you want it to be spent. General guidelines are hard to give here, but if you find that you’re spending too much time with TV, recreation, talking on the phone, or a part-time job, you’ve perhaps discovered part of the problem.

Ask yourself a few question:
Are you satisfied with your time use?
Are you putting in enough time on your most important activities to make real progress?
Do you know what the most important activities are for you at this point in your life?
Are there areas you want to spend more time on? Less?
In the observation phase, Jan kept track of her time for a week and came up with some interesting facts. After subtracting school time, sleep, meals, grooming, and household chores, she found that she had 36 hours left.

Picture Activity
Can you guess how Jan spent her time with the remaining 36 hours? Look at each picture and guess how many hours Jan spent on each activity in the box below. Look after the pictures to see how many hours Jan really spent.



Figure 3.2. Dating
© BYU Independent Study


Figure 3.3 Friends
© BYU Independent Study


Figure 3.4. Homework
© BYU Independent Study


Figure 3.5. Summer job
© BYU Independent Study


Figure 3.6. TV
© BYU Independent Study


Figure 3.7. Misc
© BYU Independent Study


Figure 3.8. Shopping
© BYU Independent Study
Answers:

Doing homework:
10
Talking to friends:
4
Dating and recreation:
5
Watching TV:
10
Finding a summer job:
2
Shopping:
1
Misc.:
4
Next, in phase two, Jan analyzed this information. Most categories seemed fine, but she was surprised about two areas. That she had spent ten full hours in front of the TV was startling to her, since she couldn’t remember much of what she had seen. Also surprising was the fact that she had spent only ten hours on her homework—about half as much as she would have predicted, and no more than she spent on TV. To hear Jan talk, she was always doing homework. But her own time record didn’t bear her out.



Figure 3.9. Watching TV
Although Jan was a good student, she often felt not quite fully prepared in class, and sometimes had to rush through homework assignments because she was out of time and hadn’t set proper priorities. She had always felt that she was a hardworking student but her time study showed a lot less effort than she had perceived. With this new information, and with Jan’s admission that she wasn’t completely satisfied with the way things were going, she realized she had a decision to make. Should she leave things as they were, or should she make some changes in her time use to improve her school preparation? She really could use some extra study time. Seeing in this study an opportunity to be better prepared and to improve her grades and her knowledge, Jan decided to make some changes.

We’ve all made similar resolutions, I’m sure. Sometimes, though, at this point, we make a big mistake. We assume that all we need to do is decide to change. But Jan had had experience with these empty resolutions. She knew that a resolution without a plan is like a car without a motor; neither one will go anyplace except downhill. So she entered phase three, planning, wherein she had to decide how to change her time use.

Jan knew that finding more time for homework meant she had to take time from something else; she couldn’t create any new time. Looking at each category, Jan didn’t want to cut into sleep or family time. She also felt that the time she spent on conversations with friends, dating, and recreation was not excessive and decided not to decrease it if she didn’t have to. But she did decide to cut her TV time in half by being more selective in what she watched, and to allot the extra time to her homework. From that point on, there would be no more indiscriminate television watching for her. Each week, she would lay out a schedule of which TV shows she would watch, listing only those programs that really interested her.

Jan’s next step was to plan a new master schedule for her week. Previously she had fit her homework in around TV and other evening events. Now she decided that the opposite should be the case. Identifying that her main task at this point in her life was her schooling, she determined that TV would have to be worked in around the demands of her homework.



Figure 3.10. Homework
So Jan scheduled her evening study time a little tighter. From 7 until 10 pm four nights a week would be homework time. Breaks could be taken as needed but this time block was to be primarily work time. Such a schedule left Friday night and all day Saturday and Sunday open for other activities, but Jan wisely considered some of that time as additional homework time in case it was needed.

That way, even if one or more of her week nights met with interference, she could make up the time. Her general goal was to be done with all homework no later than Saturday noon, so as to leave the rest of the weekend free.

Jan also set aside the hour each weekday afternoon from 4 to 5 pm for homework. Getting an early start before dinner made her feel more in control. She especially liked laying out her work, seeing what she had to do, and getting organized for the evening’s work.

With these simple decisions—which weren’t any real sacrifice but did require determination to stick to the new schedule—Jan’s next week went much better. Her homework time was increased by 50 percent, she felt better about her class preparation, and she didn’t feel she had missed a thing on TV that she really wanted to see. In three easy steps—observation, analysis, and planning—she had taken control of her time.

Notice that, in itself, cutting down on TV wasn’t enough. Jan had to decide how to use her newly available time. Cutting out time-wasters alone won’t help. The void must be filled, or Jan would likely have fallen back into the old patterns or found a new time-waster.

Assuming you’ve studied your time use and decided you want to get more done in the future than you have in the past, your next step is to make plans for the coming week so that you can spend more time at what you want to do. Of course, you needn’t be afraid to alter your schedule if other important things come up. You’re the boss, after all.