John Adair Explained

Developing a personal sense of time
Adair's view of time management accords closely with Peter Drucker's, in that he argues for the prior need to manage time in order to manage anything else. Adair was one of the first management thinkers to emphasise the critical importance of time management and its central role in focusing action and helping leaders to achieve goals. For Adair, time management is not simply about being organised or efficient, or completing certain tasks: it is about managing time with a focus on achievement. Time management should be goal-driven and results-oriented.

Success in time management should be measured by the quantity of productive work achieved, and the quality of both the work and the person's private life. Ten principles of time management given in How to Manage Your Time are:

1. Develop a personal sense of time.

2. Identify long-term goals.

3. Make medium-term plans.

4. Plan the day.

5. Make the best use of your best time.

6. Organise office work.

7. Manage meetings.

8. Delegate effectively.

9. Make use of committed time.

10. Manage your health.

Of these ten principles, developing a personal sense of time, and increasing personal effectiveness, are central to Adair, again highlighting his emphasis on individual characteristics.

In Perspective

It is perhaps unsurprising that there has been something of a backlash against Adair's thinking, given the pace and scale of changes in the work environment during the last twenty years. Adair's ideas were very new when they first appeared, and for many people their main value lay in the successful challenge they offered to the then-dominant Great Man theories. These theories, because they insisted that leaders were born and not made, completely undermined the possibility of training or developing people in leadership skills. Since Adair's