Peter Drucker liked to run a small experiment on executives, especially the ones who were proud of their memory. He asked them to write down how they thought they spent their time. Then, by his account, he locked the guesses away for a few weeks or months, while the executives kept an actual record of their days.
When the two were put side by side, Drucker wrote, “There is never much resemblance between the way these men thought they used their time and their actual records.”
One case stayed in his book. A company chairman, in Drucker’s telling, was “absolutely certain” that he divided his time roughly into three parts. A third went to his senior people. A third went to his important customers. A third went to community activities.
The chairman didn’t keep the record himself. His secretary did, for six weeks. It showed that he spent almost no time in any of the three areas.
The hours had gone somewhere else. Most of them, Drucker wrote, went to acting as a kind of dispatcher: keeping track of orders from customers the chairman personally knew, and bothering the plant with telephone calls about them. Most of those orders were going through all right anyhow, and his intervention could only delay them.
Drucker’s explanation was about memory, not honesty. Senior people, customers and the community were the tasks the chairman knew he should be spending time on. So “memory, obliging as usual, told him that these were the tasks on which he actually had spent his time.”
When his secretary first came in with the time record, he did not believe her.
It took two or three more time logs, Drucker wrote, to convince him “that record, rather than memory, has to be trusted when it comes to the use of time.”
Drucker told the story in 1967, in the second chapter of The Effective Executive, a chapter he titled “Know Thy Time.” He named neither the chairman nor the company. What he built on the story was a method. Effective executives, in his observation, “do not start with their tasks. They start with their time.” They record it as it is spent, cut what doesn’t need doing, and gather what remains into the largest blocks they can.
“Time is the scarcest resource,” he wrote, “and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.”