Squeezing 29 Hours Out of Your Day

They say that the first thing Peter Drucker told executives to do was record how they spent their time throughout each day and evaluate their priorities. Of course, they also say that Peter Drucker is dead. Regardless, I decided to take on the “Drucker Challenge” for myself. I recently spent seven days carrying a little notebook around to record how I spent every minute of each day. I even recorded trivial things such as: “Watched teammates play Worms while waiting to start our meeting – 20 minutes,” or “Talked to Mac about why Supply Chain is better than OB/HR – 5 minutes.” You get the idea.

My purpose was three fold:

1. I was feeling pretty spread thin with all my commitments and I wanted to see where I could eliminate waste (or “Mudah” as us GSCMA’ers affectionately refer to it) in my schedule.
2. I was curious how my actions during each day matched a written list of priorities that I had.
3. I wanted to have tangible proof of how weird I am.

I’m happy to say that this was a fruitful exercise in achieving each of my purposes.

I divided my schedule into four compartments: School, Spiritual, Career Development, and Personal (non-sleeping). Then I plugged each daily activity into one of those compartments. After the week was over I put all my data into an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed the results.

Here’s what I found:

• All school related activities for the week only took 45 hours. I really thought this number would be closer to 70!

• I’m really good at thinking about getting a job. I mean, I can spend hours and hours just thinking. Unfortunately, I only spent 1 hour during the week actually doing something about it (i.e. working on my resume, networking, or applying for jobs).

• I had 40 hours of personal time to spend during the week. My funniest time log? “Legal Obligations – 1 hr 40 mins,” (good old traffic school).

• My “Playing-Halo-with-roommates-to-going-on-dates” ratio was a solid two hours and thirty-five minutes to zero. My ecclesiastical leader may cringe at this statistic, but I’m okay with it.

• I found multitasking to be a great way to achieve a couple priorities in my schedule at the same time (and I’m not just talking about applying for jobs while sitting in class). For example, following the news is important to me but I’ll neglect it when I’m really busy, so I make it a priority to listen to some good podcasts while I’m getting ready in the morning, commuting, cleaning, or performing any other essential task that doesn’t require a lot of thought.

• I need to use the Internet with a purpose. Part of my study time involved going through my web browser’s viewing history and recording where I spent my online time. It was amazing how often I started out with a simple check up on my Facebook account and that somehow led to browsing Jon Hamm’s filmography on IMDB, any national articles praising Austin Collie’s brilliance, or Jim Gaffigan YouTube clips.

I have to admit that logging all my time day after day made me feel somewhat like a robot, and at times really sucked the life out of life. Having said that, I’m glad I did it and I suppose it’s an exercise I’ll repeat in the future. We all will die someday. Peter Drucker has already died. But, while we’re alive, it’s useful to periodically check how the time we spend matches the supposed priorities that we have. And, who knows? Maybe after your own careful time management review you just might realize that you can squeeze 29 hours out of your day.

-Luke Terry, Supply Chain, 2011

Interned at: SearchSino in Xi'an, China