Time management and metrics
Do you know how well you manage time? Do you have any way to measure this?
The mantra of modern management is “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Can time management skill be measured?
Once again, in the context of modern management, almost any measure cannot work. We need a metric to help us determine how well we are doing and to help us improve. The metric should be one that we can set SMART goals around: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
I offer two metrics and ways in which they can best be used. These form a subset of my “Bank Your Time” set of metrics.
- The first relevant metric is productivity, a measure of performance or tasks per unit of time. You might be wondering if this is a good metric. Some tasks take more time and others take less time. Would we be comparing apples with apples or with oranges? There are two parts to solving this dilemma. The first is estimating how long each task should take. The second is to divide all tasks into parts of equal complexity so that they take the same units of time. I call these “time slice work units”. Now when you compare time slice units of work, you are comparing apples to apples. Therefore, productivity is measured in terms of units of work per fraction of time per unit of time. The caveat here is that you might overdo the division of tasks. Set a suitable time interval, for example, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 or 1 hour, and divide the task to fit these units. Thus, if you manage to complete 20 units of work per work day, this is your productivity.
- The second relevant metric is efficiency. I take this to mean results per unit of effort. Again, this may, at first glance, seem inappropriate. Let me explain this metric in some detail. How can effort be measured? I measure this in terms of units of work, the same as the previous metric. So far so good. What about the results? For this, look at the estimates. The complexity of the expected result can be expressed in terms of the number of time interval units the task is expected to take. For example, if a task was expected to take 20 time interval units but only 18, it has an efficiency of 20/18. If the task was expected to take 18 timeslot units but took up to 20, it has an efficiency of 18/20.
It may seem that both measures are the same. There is a very small difference between them. One is expressed in terms of units of work per unit of time, the other is a ratio of expected units of work to actual units of work. The difference, again, is that the former analyzes productivity without taking into account actual tasks, while the latter measures the efficiency of each task.
How does this help? Among other things, these measures help you discover what tasks you are good at and what you could do better at, as well as set personal goals to improve your productivity.
As with anything else, the value of metrics is in how they are used.
