Lawrence Kellner, chairman and chief executive of Continental Airlines, was featured in this morning's NYTimes "Corner Office," which I've featured before here and here. The entire interview with Adam Bryant is good (as always), but I laughed when I saw Kellner's comments on getting his to-do list focused. Maybe it's like puberty--something we all have to suffer through.Q. How do you manage your time?A. I used to have a long, long to-do list, and I’ve always managed my life and managed time by using a to-do list. At the end of the day, I’d click through and see which ones got done and kind of mark them off. Then five more notes might be on my desk, and, as I’m cleaning up for the day, I’d throw them on the list.At some point, I realized that a lot of times I was doing what came to me as opposed to what was really important. So I started coming to work and saying, “O.K., what are the three most important things I need to do today?” And I’m going to rank them 1-2-3. And if No. 1 is a 12-hour task, then I’ll just spend all day working on it. I need to decide what’s the most value-added thing that I can get done on this list.As I moved further up in management, my calendar started getting kind of messy. So I sat down and said, “O.K., I’ve got 250 workdays,” or whatever it was. “How many will I spend on Wall Street? How many will I spend on Washington? How many will I spend doing sales calls with the sales team?” And then I went to the head of each department and gave them a budget of X number of days of my time, and told them, “O.K., you get X. You’ve got your budget. If I’m free, you can use it. But that’s all you get.”And then, the last piece I came to, when I became C.E.O., was to end each of my three most important meetings each month by saying: “O.K., here are the three most important things we’re doing. Here are the three priorities.”What I found very early was if I put something on the list of three, I was amazed at the amount of resources that would be applied to getting that done, because nobody liked being in the top three. But at the same time, I had to be really careful to pick the things that were going to create the most value.
By the way, I'm up to 93 items from 91--just since I wrote the last post--but hope to be at 3 by tomorrow morning. Or maybe 3-5. Right about the time I finish the great American novel.
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