Knowledge Base · Time
How does time management connect to continuous improvement?
Time management is continuous improvement applied to your own week. You audit where time goes with a DILO, spot waste such as context switching and unnecessary meetings, redesign the calendar, and run PDCA on the new pattern. Improvement work itself also needs Quadrant 2 time to exist at all, because urgent work will otherwise consume every day.
The connection is direct in the book. A DILO is an audit of a process, and the process is your working week. It shows the waste plainly: hours in status meetings that could be handled asynchronously, and constant context switching between email, chat and calls, which the author found was preventing the deep work that moves things forward.
The fix follows the improvement cycle the book teaches elsewhere. You plan a redesigned calendar, do it for a week, check whether you were more effective, and act on what you learned. Your calendar, in other words, is a plan to be tested and adjusted, not a fixed record.
The chapter's examples are improvement projects in themselves. Sarah replaced daily status meetings with a shared task board and reclaimed nearly ten hours a week. A call centre supervisor's eight-hour manual Monday report was automated into a dashboard, and the freed day went into coaching, after which his team's First Call Resolution and Customer Satisfaction improved significantly within a quarter, as the book reports it.
Start with one element rather than the whole chapter: a DILO for a week, your big rocks named, or one deep work block on the calendar.
“the answer isn’t to work harder, but to work wiser”
Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 11
Related questions
- What is a DILO (Day in the Life Of) study, and how do I run one?
- What is the PDCA cycle, and how do I run one?
- How do small improvements compound over time?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 11 (Time Management).