Does technology make us more efficient?

A few days ago I was talking to my brother.  He works at a small consulting company, and he is not very happy with his boss (and I’m being polite).

They are struggling to get new contracts, and they have reached the point where they have agreed to work a few hours less a week, and obviously get paid less.  The funny thing is that his boss is always extremely busy.  He works over 12 hours a day, and it is not strange to receive an email from him at 1 or 5 a.m.  And of course he has a Blackberry so that he can read and send emails from anywhere at any time.

Last Monday my brother sent an email to his manager because he needed an executive decision from him.  On Thursday he hadn’t had any feedback from him and time was running out, so he went to his desk and asked him: “Did you see the email I sent on Monday?”.  My brother was shocked when he heard the answer: “No, I haven’t read any emails this week”.  And not only that, but he had a chance to see how many unread emails he had in his Inbox:  over 1200!!!  He then remembered that his former manager was low-tech, and instead of using the latest mobile, he used to write phone number on paper serviettes.  So that lead to the question: (more…)

One of your main responsibilities as a project manager is to manage how the time of your team is spent.  In fact, if you are able to make an efficient use of your team’s time while they are working towards a clear goal, your success is almost guaranteed.

But let me ask you a question:  do you use your time efficiently?  Because if you don’t, how can you lead a person or a team to be effective?

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to check if you are efficient:

• Do I attend meetings where people digress and by the time the meeting is over nothing has been accomplished?
• Could I skip some of  the meetings that I currently attend without causing any problems?
• When I sit down at my desk, do I spend a lot of time thinking what I should do next?
• Do I procrastinate when I have a complex task ahead of me and I don’t know where to start?
• When I start a task, do I get interrupted often, forcing me to stop and start again later?
• When I am working on a task, do I switch to something else because I just remembered there was something urgent to do?

If you answered ‘No’ to all of these questions, congratulations!  If you recognized yourself in one or more of these situations, there is room for improvement.  The first step to improve is to know what your current situation is.  Write down for a few days:

• What you do in a detailed level (i.e. 30 minutes slots)
• What you planned to do one day and didn’t do, and the reasons why
• What the source and frequency of your interruptions are
• The meetings you attend

Once you have done this, it is usually very easy to recognize your ‘time robbers’.  Start with one at a time and commit to do something specific to improve that situation.

And when you manage your time correctly, you can assess your team to do the same, getting an overall performance improvement in your project.