QUESTION:
I would like to assist my Executive to better understand where all his time is being spent. I want to show him where I could alleviate some of the workloads. I want to be his “flowgater” instead of his “gatekeeper”. How can I go about this?
ANSWER:
I created an excel template (click here for template) for my CEO about 3 years ago that assists me in tracking his time. I know the requirements will be different for your Director as they are per industry, position etc. Each CEO/Director/Manager will have a different split with a % of time they need to spend on new business, internal meetings, client meetings and so forth. The spreadsheet helps me to track how much of his time is actually being spent on clients, Reinsurers, Internal meetings, including how much admin time he has.
I use it to advise him and be proactive in suggesting meetings with the different sectors he should be spending time on as well as suggesting lunches/dinners or even travel to the different provinces. I hope it will be useful to you as well.
The most important tab in the Excel book is the Data tab. In there you will put the start date and end date of the meeting (columns B and C, it will automatically pull through the Month and year from there. (Columns D & E). For the Company Name/type you need to create a list in column L. In column K you can create which ever type of meetings you want to track, be it Internal, HR, Client, External, one on one, strategy sessions, Exco meeting. The list can go on forever.
Once you have created the “lists” it will filter into the company name, so you will have to use the drop down box in row3, column F, row 4 and downwards as well.
In the comments/reason column I would type the purpose of the meeting, sometimes they want to know the agenda, so for example I would put “CSA discussion with legal team”.
The duration in minutes, column H must be put in in minute form, no words. So 69, 90 etc.. Do not put 1.6 or 1.5 for example.
You will need to put each meeting in individually, I usually do this at the end of every month otherwise it becomes overwhelming to catch up. Once you have put all the data in on the “data” tab you can click on the Summary and Clients tabs.
If you have not worked on a pivot table before, you can click on the PivotTable Analyze tab at the top of your page next to the “help” button. There you will find a Refresh button, select it and say refresh all. Do this on both the Clients tab and Summary tab. It will automatically populate the data you have captured on the Data tab. You can select different fields to show and filter out if you only want to show specific months etc.
Joann Hill
If you have any queries regarding the above, please email askjoann@opsa.org.za.