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Calendars of our lives are circled with compromise. The future is rushing at us. We measure just about everything in our lives in increments of minutes and hours. Spending many of our days in someone's radio cluster we see the confusion and misuse of time; how to apportion it across the days or squander it like grains of sand. Out on some borderline where time and the horizon merge and performance adjudicated by our use of the clock, there is one universal truth. When it comes to time and time management a Rhodes Scholar Wharton grad and a cab driver in L.A. are on equal footing: both begin their day with a twenty-four hour budget.
Ironically the one of the most costly mistakes made by rookie and seasoned leaders alike is the belief that everything must be done in 24 hours. In fact when you attack a single problem you really face a whole set. Beginning managers often attempt to solve all the problems "right now". When you do that your attack perimeter becomes increasingly large until finally, your logistic assets for solving the problem exceed your conceptual capacity. In the Navy we referred to this dilemma as "task saturation." Captain Phillips and the crew of the Maersk Alabama were overrun by this menacing concept with no choice but to see their plight as a desperate set of priorities. Phillips was situationally brilliant well before the first Somali pirate's grappling hook hit the rail.
Good management of problem sets is an acid test that differentiates an average leader from excellence. There's a blind spot in many of us that clings to the tradition of seeing everything collectively; "problems are problems and we need to solve them right now." It's quite the reverse. To be decisive, to win through your colleagues' abilities for the mission at hand, you must to concentrate on your issues ranked in regressive importance, one at a time. If on a given day you have a looming crisis with a morning show, an engineering proposal, a seller's error and a promotion to build, they can't all count the same. It's yours to decide: deal with serious issues in your threat-stream or dabble in a choice of technical purchases that while important, aren't today-critical.
Beware the universal pitfall regardless of your professional field. Too many leaders spend too much time with areas of decision-making that are most familiar to them instead of sharp-edged criteria for which problems need immediate attention. Thus it's a good time to reintroduce The Pareto Rule. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian mathematician. Among his postulates, "twenty percent of anything results in eighty percent of the outcome." His cardinal rule can be applied in or out of media. 20 percent of frequent flyers = 80 percent of an airlines revenue. 20% of a radio station's total sampling can and often produces 80 percent of that station's daily sampling. 20 percent of your problem-solving today should result in 80 percent of your results.
Try auditing a 5 day week. Line up your problem or goal array through that period and when that week is over assign the outcomes to your roster of objectives. Above all, don't fall victim to the quicksand of analysis.
It's a crippling and sometimes fatal management affliction that first surfaces in remarks from colleagues such as "Well, we'll require further analysis on that" or "we'll need more research."
The line officer who incessantly pursues ever more data has somehow forgotten that everything in decision-making involves the element of chance. The attempt to achieve safety and wash away or postpone key decisions by swimming in an ocean of data results in only one thing: an absence of decisiveness top-down.
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