How do you ensure good time management, wonders Paul Bennett.

Last month I explored my pet hate of people being late. I was very surprised at the amount of emails the piece generated. It seems I am not alone and there are lots of you out there who also hate slack timekeeping discipline.

I was particularly taken by a story from a fellow Navy chap. He reminded me that a very serious time to be late is when a warship is about to go to sea. For some reason, all the penalties were seemingly doubled during this period. This would explain why when his ship was pulling away from the dock a desperately late naval rating had to resort to athletics.

All those stood on the deck witnessed a taxi screech to a halt and a half dressed rating jump out the back. The rating noticed that the gangways had been removed and the ship was slowly being pulled away from the dock by a tug. He then in true chariots of fire style ran at full pelt at the ship. When he reached the end of the dock he launched himself at the distant ship much to the amazement of everyone watching. After what seemed like an age in the air he crashed into the side of the ship and somehow managed to hold onto a guardrail and was helped onboard. Because of his sterling effort he was let off with a strict warning.

On a frigate I served on in the late 1970s we had a similar system where we would let late offenders off if we had not heard their excuse before. It was so successful we even kept a log of the excuses in a book at the gangway. I was on the gangway one morning when it was reported that six sailors were all late and were last seen ashore the night before together.

We were in Malta at the time and one of the most used forms of transport ashore was a horse drawn carriage. It was an unusual and cheap taxi. The first two wayward sailors arrived and said their horse had dropped down dead in the middle of the road which is why they were late. We let them off with a caution having not heard it before. The next two arrived and made the same excuse so we sent them off for punishment. The last two were the most senior and they duly arrived on the warship. The gangway staff ribbed them slightly and said, ‘I suppose your horse is dead too is it?’ ‘Not at all,’ they replied. ‘We were making good time when the road in front of us was blocked by two dead horses.’

So how do we ensure we keep good time without resorting to naval discipline? If you can achieve the ‘eff’ words, then you have conquered the secret to time management. The Oxford English Dictionary define these as: effective – having a definite or desired effect; efficient – productive with minimum waste or effort; and effortless – seemingly without effort; natural, easy. According to Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive, doing the right thing is more important than doing things right. Doing the right thing is effectiveness, doing things right is efficiency. Focus first on effectiveness then concentrate on the efficiency.

For most of us at work our primary function is to ensure that we produce effective results, making the most efficient use of the available resources to achieve the desired results. Time is a unique resource, we all have the same amount, but we cannot store it or save it up. It is easily wasted, and if we do waste some we cannot purchase more at any price. Your effectiveness will often depend on your use of time. Treat time as a budget item; plan how you will spend it. You need to plan how you spend your time budget even more carefully than spending your financial budget. Time budgets have no credit notes or overdrafts. Once spent (or wasted), it’s spent.

The real solution is to critically review what has to be done and then be selective; this means: having a priority system that actually works; listing what has to be done in a systematic way; allocating time to get things done; accepting that you cannot do everything yourself; having to say no to some tasks or requests; and realising that some (trivial) things may well have to be left.

Finally, remember the next time you walk into a room late, you cannot use the horse story because it has already been done.