Daljit Dhadwal

Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/parema

One of the core tenets of organizational behaviour is that there is no single best way to do something. The best way to do something quite often depends on the specifics of the situation. What works under one set of circumstances may not work under a different set of circumstances.

For example, a highly directive management style might work well with a team where everyone is new and inexperienced but probably wouldn’t be effective with a team where everyone is already an expert (it would be perceived as micromanaging).

This idea—that the best thing to do depends on the specific situation—is the key idea in contingency theory.

Time management is another area where there is no single best method.

For example, some jobs consist of working on a single or very small number of projects over a long period of time with few interruptions, while other jobs consist of having to quickly shift from working on one urgent request to another, leaving very little uninterrupted time to work on longer term projects. A time management system that works in the first situation may not be very useful in the second. I think part of the reason there are so many books on time management (searching for “time management” on Amazon.com returns over 87,000 results) is because there is no single best method. Different authors have discovered systems and techniques that have worked for them in their particular environments.

In recent years, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, usually abbreviated as GTD, has come to dominate the time management category. A vibrant internet community has developed around discussing and expanding on the ideas presented in the book. At the heart of the book is a simple flowchart that describes how to record all of the things you need to do. One of the big ideas in GTD is that everything you need to do shouldn’t just be dumped into one big to-do list. In the GTD system, there are many different kinds of lists (and places) to record what you need to do. For example, in GTD you keep separate lists for phone calls you need to make, books you need to read, and groceries you need to buy. Stuff that doesn’t need to be acted on but may be useful in the future (such as office supply catalogs) gets filed. The idea is to get everything out of your mind and on paper (or some sort of electronic list). There’s a good summary of GTD on the WikiSummaries site. The following 46 minute video is a very high level introduction to GTD by David Allen.

Along with having different kinds of lists, the other big idea in GTD is to hold (minimally) a weekly review of all the stuff you’re working on. Time management systems are very fragile. Sometimes it just takes a few hours of a large number of e-mails and phone calls coming in to overwhelm the system and cause it to collapse. The weekly review is the ongoing repair and maintenance that is needed to keep the system functioning. Here’s an MP3 recording of David Allen and his staff discussing the importance of the weekly review (here’s a list of free podcasts available from the David Allen website).

The idea of having different kinds of lists for different types of things is taken to an extreme by Michael Linenberger. Linenberger has created an entire system to manage a very specific type of to-do list. Linenberger’s system is called Master Your Now (MYN). If most of the things you need to do come via e-mail and most of your time is spent jumping from one urgent thing to another, then the MYN system is for you. The MYN system is a method for managing a to-do list that only deals with urgent ad-hoc tasks.

Most people think of Microsoft Outlook as a program used to read e-mail. In reality, it’s a database system that can be used to manage all kinds of information.  One of the most underused features of Outlook is its ability to convert one type of item into another type of item. For example, Outlook can turn e-mails into calendar invites or tasks and vice versa. Linenberger’s Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook exploits this functionality to create an incredibly powerful and easy-to-use implementation of the MYN system. The following video gives a quick overview of the MYN system.

In some ways, Linenberger is the anti-Steven Covey. Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, popularized the idea of the mission statement (Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind), and then spending most of your time working on those things that are aligned with your mission statement (Habit 3: Put First Things First) rather than spending most of your time doing whatever happens to be urgent at the moment. Linenberger takes the opposite approach. The MYN system is about working on whatever happens to be urgent at the moment. The focus on urgency leads to two important ideas: the planning horizon is very short in workplaces where most things are urgent (Linenberger says that at most things can only be planned two weeks ahead); and since new urgent things are always overtaking whatever was previously urgent, managing start dates becomes more important than managing deadlines. Linenberger’s system is essentially a method for managing when you’ll actually be able to start things. When new urgent tasks come in, the start dates for less urgent tasks get pushed out further into the future.

In their respective books, Getting Things Done and Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook, David Allen and Michael Linenberger present many other ideas on time management in addition to the ideas discussed here that are sure to be useful. Available for less than $20 each, both books are worth reading.