UCLA

Readers of Management and Business Review will be familiar with much of the advice encountered in the time management literature. “Don’t focus on the urgent at the expense of the important.” “No is a two-letter word.” “Keep your workspace organized.” In our experience with executives, colleagues, MBA students, and all high-functioning professionals, the adoption of these practices is quite limited. We attribute this to a lack of understanding of their complementary nature. Each recommendation is typically considered in isolation, but in fact they all amplify each other. To make this case, we draw on three central pillars of operations management (OM), and offer new perspectives on time management in doing so. This perspective also clarifies how each pillar paves the way for the others. The consequence of this complementarity is that, over time, the value of many of these practices that we have all heard about is even greater than might appear from the way they tend to be portrayed. We hope that thinking about “the operations of you” will provide additional stimulus to try it out, one small change at a time.