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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Advantages of Time Tracking

One of the key best practices of the Six Disciplines program is to encourage every team member within the organization track 100% of their time.

For some organizations and individuals, this is a new or foreign concept, and many think of it as unnecessary overhead or even consider it "micro-managing."

Time tracking not so much about accountability and making sure you're not wasting time; it's really about learning.

The entire Six Disciplines methodology is about teaching organizations how to build a better business faster. It eventually comes down to every decision that every team member makes on a daily basis. The best performing organizations have to learn to unlock the capabilities and potential of every team member. To do that, every team member has to learn how to align their daily activities to the goals of the company.

Time-tracking helps individuals to learn faster.

It begins by tracking your time against your Individual Plan - the activities that you've agreed (with your team leader) to work on during a quarter. What you'll find over time is that your ability to plan more effectively will increase, as you learn how your daily activities and time spent align with your plan and the goals of your organization.

The reasons why most people miss their plans is that they're either:
  • Working on things they didn't expect to do
  • or, they underestimated the time it would take to do something

BOTTOMLINE: By tracking your time on a daily basis, you'll dramatically accelerate your learning of how to more effectively plan for activities for your quarter (month, week, day). Multiply this effect times each person in your organization that also tracks their time, and you'll have a learning organization that continually improves in their ability to plan more effectively and make better decisions as to what to spend time on as a result.

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