Maintenance management can be a pressure cooker. Emergencies, short staffing, vendor problems, shop backlogs and asset breakdowns all contribute to stressors on the job. While removing the stressors is impossible, changing one’s attitude is quite possible by “mastering” one’s environment.
This can be accomplished by developing time management skills, which helps people feel mastery. The goal is not to feel in control, because that is an illusion. The objective of time management is to feel that you can master anything that comes at you. Mastery of this type pays dividends in effectiveness.
The Nature of Time
Time is the only truly non-renewable resource. Unlike energy, it cannot be saved or created. It is also the only resource that everyone has exactly the same amount of. In the amount of time, we are all truly equal.
Do you know how you spend your day? Keep a log of what you actually do in a typical week. Time management experts agree the place to start managing your time is finding out how you spent your time.
As you go through each day, write down the percentage of time you spend at each activity. Then, as you review the percentages, ask yourself: If I were the kind of manager I’d like to be, what would be the ideal percentages for each activity?
The reality of being a maintenance manager is that frequently you are not in control of your time. When you are not in control of most of your time, it is doubly important to control what little time is left.
Here are four projects to improve your time management.
Project No. 1 – Schedule time to clean up your desk, organize your office
Get a box of manila folders and put them in order with the tabs alternating left to right.
Get a blank piece of full-size paper to use as your master to-do list. Or, use Microsoft Outlook’s tasks or another mobile phone, tablet or computer calendar system. It is important to get a to-do system that is easy to use and keep on top of.
Put all of your papers from your desk, and from elsewhere in your office, in a pile.
Go through every piece of paper in that pile and be ruthless about throwing out as much as possible away. Separate into a new pile the papers you need to keep. If there is an action that needs to be taken, save the paper in this new pile.
From this pile, start with the top paper and ask yourself: Is there any work that must be done for this? If so, add that assignment to your master to-do list. Then, ask yourself: Should I keep the piece of paper? Remember, you recorded the assignment. If it’s a keeper and no file already exists, prepare a manila folder.
Continue with this routine up until you reach the bottom of the pile. Do not do any work required by any paper unless it can be handled within 1 to 2 minutes.
Clean and organize your desktop. This encourages efficient work habits.
Put your work on your desk. Complete it to the level possible at that time and put it back into its proper files. This keeps your desk clean between each activity.
Apply the same procedures to your drawers, file cabinets, closets, etc.
Project No. 2 – Supercharge your time
Look at areas where you could do two things at once without sacrificing quality of either. For example, your twice-daily commute. An hour commute could translate into more 200 hours a year of learning time through the use of “books on tape” or Great Courses.
Get an app for your smartphone or carry a microcassette recorder to record ideas, memos, letters and instructions. If you have staff support, have them transcribe your “tapes.” Have them use a separate page for each idea or project.
Delegate some of your tasks/work to your staff. A well-trained crew will multiply your effectiveness.
Learn to speed-read. Benefits to learning this skill include being able to absorb information faster and allows reading material in less time.
Project No. 3 – The 80/20 Rule
Nineteenth century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that in Italy, 80 percent of its wealth and influence belonged to only 20 percent of the population. Investigating different industries, he found that 80 percent of the results come from just 20 percent of the actions.
This generalization, originally called the Pareto Principle, is now known as the 80/20 Rule.
Since 80 percent of our results will flow from 20 percent of our activities, if we identify these critical few activities and increase our time commitment to them, we can double or triple our results each day.
Go through your master to-do list and examine each item. Divide the items into a 20 percent important, highly leveraged activity and an 80 percent low leverage activity.
The 20 percent activities should be scheduled first during your high energy intervals throughout the day. (Energy levels will be explained later on in this article.) The top three of these activities become your bottom lines. Those bottom lines are: If I do nothing else today, I will do my bottom line items.
Fill in the low return on investment activities – the 80 percent activities – around the 20 percent activities.
Assign realistic priorities or codes to each task:
- Priority 1: Due today by 6 p.m.
- Priority 2: Due tomorrow by 6 p.m.
- Priority 3: Due by the end of the week.
- Priority 4: Due during the next week.
An alternative is to prioritize tasks within this grouping by adding a decimal place. For example, a Priority 1.0 task needs to be done immediately, whereas a Priority 1.5 task needs to be done by the end of day.
A word of caution about the 80/20 Rule. We assume we know what the most important activity is at any given time or what tasks are the most profitable. This is not always the case, however. You might never know what is important before the end of the work.
Think about police detectives. How do they know the one fact or the piece of evidence that will prove to be pivotal in a prosecution? They don’t know. That’s why they methodically gather everything even remotely relevant in their search for solving a crime.
Project No. 4 – Energy level
Another key to mastering time is to determine your patterns of energy. Our energy goes up and down all day. Your most productive hours in a day will be when your energy level is high. That’s when you should take on your most challenging work.
With high energy we are better at concentrating, analysis and problem solving. With low energy, such tasks become more difficult and take us more time to complete, often with not-so-good results.
Look into behavior that robs you of energy, such as big lunches, certain meetings or certain people. Leave time for high priority work and jealously guard this time.
Here is an exercise to help you establish your energy level by times of the day
- Set-up a spreadsheet with hours down the rows and days across the columns.
- Every hour or so, evaluate your energy level, giving it a score of 1 to 10, and add this to the spreadsheet.
- After a week, plot the curves and you will see your high energy times.
- Knowing this, you can plan your high return (20 percent) activities during your high energy times.
When it comes to managing any maintenance operation, the effort put into developing time management skills and proactively mastering time is well worth the effort. Without doing so, you get to the end of your work day with plenty of unfinished work and wonder where the time went.
Joel Levitt is director of projects for Reliabilityweb.com’s Reliability Leadership Institute. Reliabilityweb.com provides the latest reliability and uptime maintenance news and educational information. He is also author of Fleet Maintenance’s Management Column.
