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Topics Covered
- Time leadership
- Urgent versus important
- Prioritising the important
- When to say yes or no
- Dealing with emails
Talk Citation
Edmans, A. (2022, April 27). Time management in the digital age [Video file]. In The Business & Management Collection, Henry Stewart Talks. Retrieved October 12, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.69645/OJWM5150.Export Citation (RIS)
Publication History
Transcript
Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
This is Alex Edmans.
I'm a professor of finance
at London Business School,
and I'm giving a talk on time
management in the digital age.
0:11
Now you might think that's a strange topic
for a finance professor to speak about,
so why am I speaking on it?
It's because around 10 years ago I realised that
what we typically teach at business school,
things like the weighted
average cost of capital,
those are important.
But to be successful in
the modern business world,
soft skills such as time
management are critical.
I started researching
this myself,
and I have to admit it
wasn't just altruism,
so I could pass it
on to students.
It was something that I
was struggling with myself
having to balance research,
teaching, policy work and so forth.
What I'm going to
present today is
hopefully an amalgam of
all of that research.
What I'm going to do
is present a range of
different time management tips
because time management
is very personal.
Different people have
different styles,
not every technique will
work for every person.
What I'd encourage
you to do is to
try a different range of them.
Some might work for you
and others might not.
1:12
I'll start by talking about
how I used to manage my time.
Just like many of you, I
had a long to-do list.
How would I decide which thing
to do first on my to-do list?
There were two different
rules that I would have.
First, might be that I would do
the low hanging fruit first.
Anything simple, like
replying to an email.
I do that first because
once you complete it,
you get the satisfaction of
crossing it off a to do list.
Maybe I got to the end of the
day and maybe I'd crossed off
19 things out of my
20 strong to do list.
But there may be one
really important thing I
hadn't attacked because I was just busy
crossing off that low hanging fruit.
The second rule, that
I typically had,
was I would focus on the
more urgent tasks first.
Something with a
deadline of Tuesday,
I would do earlier than something
with the deadline of Friday
and certainly something with
a deadline of next month.
Indeed, this is the time management
technique we all learned at school.
You'd always do homework due tomorrow over
something due at the end of the week.
But the problem with
that is, again,
you might just be firefighting
in the short term,
maybe something that was really
important you never actually got to.
Why?
Just because it didn't
have an urgent deadline.
For me, one of the most
transformative books
that I've read on this issue is
'The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People' by Stephen Covey.
What he says is,
"Rather than stratifying our list
into the urgent vs. the not urgent,
we need to satisfy our list into things
that are of importance vs. not important
and do the important tasks first,
even if they are not urgent."
That sounds a bit abstract.
Let me give you an example.
It might be that something
which is urgent and
important is to serve
an existing client.
But something which is
important but not urgent
is to develop a new
client relationship.
Why is that not urgent?
Well, there's no deadline.
If you don't have
that client yet,
they're not there asking
you to get back to them.
But it is important because
to be a successful
businessperson,
you need to develop
a broad client mix.
Maybe another way of thinking
about it is things that
you want to do vs. things
that you have to do.
Things that you have to do are
urgent because if
you don't do them,
somebody will bring
them to your attention.
If you don't respond
to a client request,
they will email you and say,
"Where's the analysis
I asked you for?"
But developing a new client
relationship is not urgent.
If you don't do it, nobody
is going to bring it to
your attention because there's
no new client to tell you,
"Why haven't you
reached out to me?"
This is the secret of
time management is to
focus on things
that we want to do,
things that are important
but not urgent.
Everybody can do the
basic time management
of doing urgent stuff,
meeting deadlines.
We learnt how to do this when we
were at school and
handing in homework.
But the important
thing is to try to
prioritise the things
that we truly want to do.