5 September 2007
Managing Management Time™ In The Real World; In Real Life
The mission statement or vision statement of any manager or leader has two simple words, to
Control Events
Simply stated, if the manager is not controlling events, then events will be controlling manager. There is no third alternative.
Many of us begin by trying to efficiently manage our time. William Oncken, Jr. (1912-1988), created his unique MMT philosophy and its humorous and down-to-earth imagery in 1960. He believed that efficiency — the “daily diary” in the manager’s Life at a Glance binder approach to time management — is useful only after the manager is in control of his time in the first place.
But as the Alert Readers knows, each day brings many unexpected interruptions, sometimes so many that managers may not get around to doing what they were planning to do. Of course, handling those interruptions is part of the job.
How the manager handles interruptions determines whether or not he is in control of events. Or whether events are controlling him.
For example, suppose our harried manager has a deadline to meet for a project and he plans to spend the whole day working on it, then his boss calls him in for a three-hour meeting to discuss the status of another project.
What happens to the manager’s plan?
Or suppose a peer or one of the manager’s staff members comes to him with an urgent problem, which must take care of right away to avert a disaster.
In these cases, someone else is determining what the manager does and when he does it, no matter what he had planned. And in the case of the peer or staff member, he might even be doing something that isn’t even his job to do.
Of course, in neither of those cases could he refuse to cooperate on the grounds that he has a plan and must stick to it. That would hurt the organization. And when the manager does something that’s bad for the organization, the employer, it’s also bad for the manager’s career progression.
So managers are caught in a paradox - organizational management versus time management. Managers need to maintain good relations with the people he work with to do his job effectively, but they are precisely the source of the interruptions in which can prevent the manager from doing his job. That paradox and solution is the basis of the Oncken MMT Philosophy.
So here’s the sales pitch:
Your Business Blogger invites managers to Surf the Molecule and explore Our Approach. The Manager will get a preview of what he will learn in attending the seminar:
- how to recognize the paradox in his own job and
- how to deal with it realistically and productively
Contact Your Business Blogger for more propaganda. 
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