INVENTORY AND ITS ROLE IN PREDICTING THE FUTURE

The Art of War is a manual of military strategy written by the Chinese general Sun Tzu over 2,000 years ago. In it he affirms that every battle is won or lost before it is even started: The victorious commander understands and respects his enemy, and becomes aware of the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, primarily by taking a higher perspective, being able to see the entire landscape, including his own forces, the enemy’s forces, and all other circumstances that may affect the outcome.

Time is your battlefield. Your talents and ambitions comprise your army and everyone else in your world occupies the opposing camp. Taking inventory of your assets and liabilities within time means looking backwards, taking stock, and then moving forward with a solid yet flexible plan, one that can influence others and be implemented practically. This is where the wisdom of project management comes in.

A CRASH COURSE IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project management has been around as a formalized school of thought and study since the 1950s. It emphasizes the importance of planning, communication, performance, and review. It starts with a higher-level perspective of a project, and then breaks it down to the smallest reasonable components. Project management forces you to visualize a project from beginning to end. It allows you to plan for contingencies and revisions, and replaces the traditional “seat-of-the-pants” approach with an organized, accountable agenda.

The Project Management Institute (www.pmi.org) is an authority on project management, and publishes a work known as the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). The intent of the PMBOK is to assist project managers everywhere, regardless of their experience, by providing a standard and a logical plan for the successful completion of projects.

Figure 3.1: The Project Management Body of Knowledge identifies five phases in the life of a typical project.

• Initiation: In this phase, the project is conceived and assessed as viable or not; ideas are formulated; and the expected results and timeline are first considered.

• Planning: A significant amount of time on the project—sometimes most of it—is spent here. Every detail of the project is accounted for, including possible failures, contingencies, estimated times for completion of each part, and budget and resource estimates.

• Execution: The project gets underway, people start to work on the project, and momentum begins.

• Control: The work of the project is performed, while the project manager oversees and updates the plan and communicates progress and changes to all involved.

• Closure: Once the project is completed, the project teams are broken up, final accounting is done, and things are cleaned up and put away.

The project is summarized and guided by a project plan, a document that lays out tasks and their respective time lines throughout the life of the project. Far from being a static document, the project plan remains flexible, a living, breathing thing, that can adapt to changes while still allowing the project to move ahead.

Though no project manager has a crystal ball to predict how things will pan out in the future, she can look back into the past, through research, analysis, and consultation with experts and mentors to know, within reason, what to expect.

A WEDDING: PROJECT MANAGEMENT WITH CAKE AT THE END

Even if you’ve never studied project management, if you’ve been involved in planning a wedding, you know what it’s about—fixed budgets, fixed time lines, inexperience, and lots of pressure. That’s why many wedding planners hand out guidebooks with titles such as What to Do When Planning Your Wedding. It’s project management for the uninitiated.

In short, project management makes everything as clear as possible and envisions all aspects of the project before they happen. It does not necessarily make a project effortless, but its principles and rules ensure that work and resources are properly guided. The planning phase allows for an educated degree of foresight (inventory), the control phase ensures clear communication and instruction (influence), and together they create a road map to help keep the project on course (implementation).

WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH TIME MANAGEMENT?

Everything! Project management is central to successful time management since everything you undertake is a project in one way or another. Each day is a project, as are the weeks, months, jobs, vacations, and events that make up your life. Project management provides lessons that are key to the successful use of time. For example:

• The legitimacy of planning: Taking time to create a practical, flexible, workable action plan gives you a realistic structure for the day, and a tangible tool for negotiation, delegation, and influence.

• The importance of control: Allowing yourself time to update your daily project plan and communicate it to others as the day unfolds ensures clarity of thought and action in the face of oncoming tasks and stress.

• Closure: Taking the time to follow up: People who jump from task to task without taking a moment to schedule follow-up activities are doomed to forget something. Closure on a task-by-task basis ensures that nothing falls into the cracks. Closure on a day-by-day basis ensures continuous control and improvement.

• The value of learning from the past in predicting the future: People often say, “I cannot use time management techniques because every day is too different.” However, if you were to step back and observe work patterns over longer periods, say, a month, a quarter, a year, or five years, certain configurations would emerge—patterns that empower you to predict the future and control events to a far greater degree than you’d originally thought. This is exactly what we’ll discuss on page 30.

THE CRITICAL PATH

Another project management term that has implications in time management is the critical path, which is defined as the shortest possible time line by which all component tasks of a project can be completed. Like the carriages on a train, they are rigid and locked together, so that if any one of the tasks is delayed by a day or even a few hours, each successive task will have to move with it, and the project will be late or over budget.

Figure 3.2: Working to the critical path: No room for the unexpected.

A wise project manager does not want to be on the critical path. However, she knows it is wise to identify it, so as to be able to plan backwards from the due date, and then factor in some extra time to allow for the unexpected. For example, a task that might take two days of actual labor will be planned as needing three, so that when something unexpected happens, a delay of even an entire day will not affect the project.

Figure 3.3: Working off the critical path is much healthier and more realistic. Note the gaps between the tasks.

WHAT DOES THE CRITICAL PATH HAVE TO DO WITH TIME MANAGEMENT?

Many people work to a critical path every day. Meetings are booked back-to-back, projects and to-do lists fill the schedule to such a degree that even taking a lunch break becomes out of the question. The pressure of getting everything done forces people to line up tasks one after the other, like a never-ending freight train, and things inevitably run over time.

Cool Time changes all that. Once we build our task inventory, we will apply it to build a new type of daily project plan called the I-Beam Agenda. As a wise project manager, you will then be able to identify your critical path and steer away from it.

THE HOOVER DAM

The Hoover Dam, on the Arizona-Nevada border, stands as one of the greatest engineering marvels of the twentieth century. It is a shining example of successful project management. In fact, it helped develop many of the techniques still used in project management and construction today, from just-in-time delivery of materials to the development of the hard hat. Frank Crowe, the dam’s project manager, was able to bring the project in two years early, which was doubly impressive, given that he faced a hefty fine for each day the project ran over.

A fascinating fact about this huge structure is that it’s not actually attached to anything! That monstrous dam is held against the canyon walls by the pressure of the water itself. As the engineers point out, it has to have room to expand and contract with the climate of the desert and to move with the tectonics of the Earth. If it were fixed rigidly, it would destroy itself. It demonstrates perfectly how flexibility is the key to strength.

TAKING INVENTORY

People often say their problem with time management is that they can’t plan for the unknown. “I don’t know what’s going to happen today,” they say, “and even if I plan my day, there’s always something that comes along that throws all my plans out the window.” Well, actually, there’s a lot we can do to predict and influence the future, and a lot we can do to ensure we get the right things done when and how we want. It starts by taking inventory, and for that, let’s have a quick look inside your favorite restaurant.

How does a restaurant chef know how much beef to buy per week? How much fish? How many pounds of strawberries? With experience and review, he can observe the eating habits and traffic patterns of his customers, and can expect, with 90 percent accuracy, that Friday lunch-times and Sunday dinners will be the busiest, and that Wednesdays are the most popular days for fish. He can buy accordingly (inventory) and then influence the diners’ choices by creating a pleasing menu. The economics of the restaurant business do not allow for wasted food, so an effective future depends on learning from the past.

Unless you’ve been at your current job for less than five days, you too have a good sense of the types of tasks that you face in your day. These can be categorized into two types—predictable, and what I call “expectable”—or, in other words, the normal stuff that you know is going to happen and the other stuff that just might happen. The goal of taking inventory is to ensure enough time is reserved for each of these types of tasks.

Let’s clarify further: Predictable tasks are the ones you expect on a daily basis. These may include:

• regularly scheduled meetings

• preparing your store, department, or office to open for business

• phone calls

• e-mail

• office interaction and chat

• focused, self-directed work

• administration

You might have others to add to this list depending on your particular job. They might include:

• traveling to a customer location

• dealing face-to-face with customers

• giving presentations

It’s up to you to identify the predictable tasks specific to your work. The point is, whatever type of job you have, they’re the activities that you know will happen on a given day, but not necessarily at a fixed time. They’re just part of what makes up “work.”

But let’s stop and look at them a little more closely before moving on to the second category, the expectables.

What do you know about your predictable tasks? If someone was to ask you, “On any given day, how many meetings do you actually attend? How many phone calls do you make and take? How many e-mails do you deal with?” you’d probably shrug your shoulders and say, “It depends on the day.” If you were pressed harder for an answer, what would it be? Two meetings a day? Four? Six? Do you make and take twenty phone calls a day or 200? Maybe then you could come up with a reasonable number. Now, how long does each of these tasks take? How long is the average meeting? How long is the average phone call? How long do you spend reading and responding to each e-mail? Perhaps Mondays are different from Fridays in terms of what you have to do, and certainly one phone call or e-mail will differ from the next. But the point is, these are the activities that fill up our days. We know they’re going to happen, yet they still occur in an uncontrolled manner.

And “uncontrolled” is one thing we want to avoid since once we enter the “uncontrolled zone,” we lose track of time.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING UNCONTROLLED

Have you ever been introduced to someone new only to forget his name five minutes later? This is an example of being trapped in an uncontrolled moment. It’s because the actions involved during a formal introduction require so much presence of mind—the handshake, the smile, the posture, the formalities involved in meeting—that any extra information, such as the person’s name, goes skipping off the surface of our short-term memory like a pebble on a lake. We are not in control.

The trick is to change your approach from reactive to proactive. As you extend your hand for a handshake, remind yourself that memorization must now occur. This requires no change in your outward behavior, no need to shake hands more aggressively; it simply sets the stage for the crucial next few seconds of social interaction.

Make sure you hear the person’s name, and then use word association immediately to tie the name to an icon or image in your mind. Does he look vaguely like a celebrity? Someone you went to school with? You certainly don’t have to reveal the specific association to the person; in fact it’s wise to keep that information entirely to yourself, but it guarantees an easy way to remember a name for the duration of the conversation.

The point of this name-remembering lesson is not the word-association trick itself, but to remember to do it when the time comes. Once you remember to do the word association, you will have transformed that interaction from an uncontrolled one to a proactive one, and that’s what we want to achieve for the entire workday—control.

If you take the time now to quantify how long your predictable tasks will take you on a given day, based on your past experience, you can predict with reasonable certainty how many hours per day must be set aside for them in the future. You know that there will be phone calls, e-mail, and meetings next Monday, so why not reserve the time for them now?

You don’t have to get down to exact numbers, minutes, and seconds (we don’t need to get obsessive here), but it’s just like keeping a household budget. You have to understand your expenses in order to manage your purchases. For example, you might recognize that on a given day:

• You make and receive roughly ten phone calls.

• The average duration of a phone call is six minutes.

• You often have two longer calls each day of fifteen minutes each.

• The total daily inventory of calls is ninety minutes.

• You write and receive twenty e-mails.

• The time it takes you to handle each e-mail is five minutes.

• The total daily inventory of e-mails is 100 minutes.

• You attend two meetings (both formal and casual meetings).

• The average duration of a formal meeting is sixty minutes.

• The average duration of a casual meeting is fifteen minutes.

• The total daily inventory of meetings is seventy-five minutes.

Figure 3.4: This is generally how much time you have to allow for the regular activities of the day.

Suppose also that your workday is from 8:00A.M. to 5:00P.M., a total of nine hours. Well, then, for this given day, we can already predict that over four and a half hours need to be reserved for e-mail, phone calls, and meetings.

“Yes, but,” you say, “I can’t tell if I will be on the phone for a predictable number of minutes. Things are just way too busy for that—there’s no consistency!”

To which I respond, “Just think back.” Remember yesterday, the day before, the day before that, and back as far as you want to. You will most likely see some regular daily volumes of activity that can be quantified. What might be obscuring the view, however, is that these predictable events occur somewhat randomly throughout the day. Your next task, once you’ve identified both the predictable and expectable tasks, will be to arrange them into a more convenient sequence, using the power of influence as your chief weapon.

Expectable Tasks

Expect the unexpected. This other category of tasks consists of the things that come at you from left field and derail all of your other neat plans. Most people refer to them as “crises,” and they are the reason other time management approaches fail. It’s easy to plan for what you know is coming, but what about what you can’t foresee? My point is, if an activity happens occasionally, and can happen again, then it should not be viewed as a “crisis” but as an “expectable event.” This is important, since an event that is expected, even if not desired, can be integrated into a time management plan, whereas one that we “just hope won’t happen,” tends to get forgotten about until it’s too late.

Examples of what others would define as a crisis but that I would define as “expectable” might include: Your manager drops an additional task onto your desk; a colleague calls in sick; an unhappy customer shows up demanding satisfaction; a defective product is returned; the CEO arrives unexpectedly from head office. These are things that have happened before, and as unwelcome as they may be, they will likely happen again. Though you can’t predict when, your experience will give good insight into the odds of one happening, which in project management terms is a sound estimation and planning technique.

The main thing to remember is that by identifying and planning for the predictable tasks we spoke of earlier, as well as the less frequent, less desirable “expectable” tasks of your day, you are not adding more to your plate; you are being realistic and taking stock of the numerous tasks you face on a given day that are usually so split up that they become a blur. You are allotting the time for them in advance and allowing them to become parts of your project plan, rather than simply reacting to them when they happen. That’s control.

Figure 3.5: This is what you’ll have to allow to include the expected types of activity.

THE POWER OF THE RESERVED ACTIVITY

Think of the number of times you’ve set out somewhere, perhaps to a shopping mall or downtown, only to find your plans delayed while you circle the block or cruise the parking lot looking for a space. It takes the momentum out of your trip, at least for a short while; yet parking is something we usually don’t think about until we arrive. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a series of permanent, personal parking spaces at all of our regular destinations to just slide into whenever we want? This would allow time to be spent on tasks rather than on travel.

In the context of your busy workday, that’s what you can do when you schedule the results of your inventory and actually put them into your calendar, every day, as reserved activities. Most people schedule only the unique activities, such as a specific meeting or a dental appointment, and that’s where the problems start. Suppose a colleague calls you up and says, “We need to meet next Tuesday. What does your day look like?” (Worse, he simply looks up your calendar on the shared network calendar system and books the meeting on your behalf.) The odds are that your schedule for next Tuesday will show only the unique items, leaving the rest of the day deceptively empty.

However, if you have scheduled your predictable and expectable activities as daily reserved events, Tuesday’s calendar will clearly show a block of time put aside for the work of the day. This reserved block will not swallow 100 percent of the day, as Figure 3.6 (below) shows. There will still be time available to meet with your colleague. However, the power of the reserved activity helps ensure that even those days you haven’t thought much about yet are already well prepared for the work to come.

Figure 3.6: It doesn’t mean you’re free to meet with your colleague only between 3:30P.M. and 5:00P.M. The components can be moved around to suit your needs, as the next section,“From Blocks to Bits” describes. But at least you and he each know how much time you can realistically spare.

If you use software such as Microsoft Outlook or ACT! to schedule your day, then setting an activity as “Reserved” on a recurring basis is easy. But even if you use a paper day planner, you can mark off these recurring activities with a pencil.