expand icon
book Fundamentals of Management 7th Edition by Ricky Griffin cover

Fundamentals of Management 7th Edition by Ricky Griffin

Edition 7ISBN: 978-1133627494
book Fundamentals of Management 7th Edition by Ricky Griffin cover

Fundamentals of Management 7th Edition by Ricky Griffin

Edition 7ISBN: 978-1133627494
Exercise 19
Exercise Overview
Time management skills refer to the ability to prioritize tasks, to work efficiently, and to delegate appropriately. This exercise allows you to assess your own current time management skills and to gather some suggestions for how you can improve in this area.
Exercise Background
As we saw in this chapter, effective managers must be prepared to switch back and forth among the four basic activities in the management process. They must also be able to fulfill a number of different roles in their organizations, and they must exercise various managerial skills in doing so. On top of everything else, their schedules are busy and full of tasks-personal and job related activities that require them to "switch gears" frequently throughout the workday.
Stephen Covey, a management consultant and the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has developed a system for prioritizing tasks. First, he divides them into two categories-urgent and critical. Urgent tasks, such as those with approaching deadlines, must be performed right away. Critical tasks are tasks of high importance-say, those that will affect significant areas of one's life or work. Next, Covey plots both types of tasks on a grid with four quadrants: A task may be urgent, critical, urgent and critical, or not urgent and not critical.
Most managers, says Covey, spend too much time on tasks that are urgent when in fact they should be focused on tasks that are critical. He observes, for example, that managers who concentrate on urgent tasks meet their deadlines but tend to neglect critical areas such as long-term planning. (Unfortunately, the same people are also prone to neglect critical areas of their personal lives.) In short, effective managers must learn to balance the demands of urgent tasks with those of critical tasks by redistributing the amount of time devoted to each type.
Exercise Task
Visit one of the websites of FranklinCovey (thefirm cofounded by Stephen Covey) at www.franklincovey.com/urgencyanalysis/ua-prof.html. This site includes a brief online survey that should take about 10 minutes to complete.
Explanation
like image
like image
no-answer
This question doesn’t have an expert verified answer yet, let Examlex AI Copilot help.
close menu
Fundamentals of Management 7th Edition by Ricky Griffin
cross icon