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How to Make the Most of the Time You Spend at Work

Self
Self-Awareness
Individual Contributor
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Idea

The most impactful question that you can ask in your job is: How much time do you spend on your top three most valuable activities in your job?

Here “valuable activities” refers to the value you create in your job, rather than what you value yourself. Every job has some output that is the beneficiary to others.

You can even look at your calendar last month and look at your calendar next month and come up with a percentage of your time that you’re spending on those three most valuable activities.

If you were to shift your time away from the least valuable to the most valuable activities, your performance would go way up.

Example

I was working with a top team in Silicon Valley. There were 10 managers around the table and we did an exercise where we went through the following steps:

  1. Reflect and write down the top three most valuable activities in your job.
  2. Refer to your calendar for the last month and next month. How much of your time do you spend on those top three valuable activities?
  3. On your (last month and/or next month’s) calendar, check off any activity that is either:
    • Somewhat related but not clearly to the most valuable activities.
    • Not aligned with the most valuable activities.
  1. What percentage of your time at work do you spend on your top three most valuable activities?

The result was that not a single manager had more than 30% of their time at work allocated to the top three most valuable activities in their job.

The head of marketing realized that the most valuable activity for her team was to support major product releases in the company because that’s what moves the needle on growth. Currently, they were spending equal amounts of time on all releases so she resolved to allocate more time to the major releases and less time to the minor releases.

Action

To have a better career and perform better in your job, go back to the idea of concentrating on your three most valuable activities.

Ask yourself: what are they for me?

Then, look at your calendars and then start changing things.

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Resources

Morten T. Hansen

Morten T. Hansen

Morten T. Hansen is a management professor at University of California, Berkeley. He is the coauthor (with Jim Collins) of the New York Times bestseller Great by Choice and the author of the highly acclaimed Collaboration and Great at Work.

Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School and INSEAD (France), professor Hansen holds a PhD from Stanford Business School, where he was a Fulbright scholar. His academic research has won several prestigious awards, and he is ranked one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Morten Hansen was also a manager at the Boston Consulting Group, where he advised corporate clients worldwide. Morten travels the world to give keynotes and help companies and people become great at work.

mortenhansen.com

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