Mastering Time Management: Peter Drucker's Guide to Making Every Hour Count - sumanksp/reference GitHub Wiki
"[Peter] Drucker taught that what gets measured gets managed. So, how can we possibly hope to manage our time if we don’t measure precisely where our time goes? Inspired by Drucker’s challenge, I’ve kept a spreadsheet with one key metric: the number of creative hours logged each day, with the self-imposed imperative to stay above a thousand creative hours a year. This mechanism keeps me on the creative march—doing research, developing concepts, and writing—despite ever-increasing demands for travel, team leadership, and working with executives. But you also have to make your time count. The 'secret' of people who do so many difficult things, writes Drucker, is that they do only one thing at a time; they refuse to let themselves be squandered away in 'small driblets [that] are no time at all.' This requires the discipline to consolidate time into blocks, of three primary types. First, create unbroken blocks for individual think time, preferably during the most lucid time of day; these pockets of quietude might be only ninety minutes, but even the busiest executive must do them with regularity. Second, create chunks of deliberately unstructured time for people and the inevitable stuff that comes up. Third, engage in meetings that matter, making particular use of carefully constructed standing meetings that can be the heartbeat of dialogue, debate, and decision; and use some of your think time to prepare and follow up." — From The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter Drucker.
These are essentially five such practices—five such habits of the mind that have to be acquired to be an effective executive:
Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.
Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, 'What results are expected of me?' rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.
Effective executives build on strengths—their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.
Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.
Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on 'dissenting opinions' rather than on 'consensus on the facts.' And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.
Ref: The Scipionic Circle 87: Mastering Time Management, Depth Over Breadth, and The Paradox of Desire