Time Management and Procrastination Activity/Case Study

Read the case study below and complete the questions. (Source: Wikieducator)

Donna is studying Anatomy and Physiology by distance learning at The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. Her assignment is due on the coming Wednesday, so she started it last Friday evening after dinner.

She decided to work in her bedroom. Her softball gear was on her desk, so she put the books on her bed. She spent a while looking for a pen, but couldn’t find one. However, she borrowed the pencil by the phone. When she began to read the assignment, she discovered that she needed some notes she had left at work. She thought she would therefore begin by reading the textbook, and would get the notes on Monday. After half an hour of reading, her boyfriend, Jason, rang. He asked whether she wanted to go and visit some friends. Donna decided to continue work on the assignment on Saturday.

Saturday was very busy. Her friend Sharon rang at 10.30 to ask whether Donna would be available to play softball at 2.00 that afternoon. Donna was still in bed, but she agreed to meet the others at 11.00 to do some practice. Her team won their game and they all went to the pub to celebrate. By the time Donna got home, it was too late to do any studying.

On Sunday she went to church in the morning and visited her aunt and uncle in the afternoon. She didn’t remember the assignment until after dinner. She still didn’t have her notes, and there were parts of the textbook she found difficult to understand. The assignment was proving to be harder than she thought it would be. She really needed some advice. She phoned her tutor but all she got was a message saying that the tutor would ring back if she left her name and number. Donna began to think that she wouldn’t get the assignment finished on time. It needed to be in the tutor’s dropbox on Wednesday. She’d have to do some quick work on Monday and Tuesday evenings. It wouldn’t be her best work, of course, but that couldn’t be helped.

On Monday she wakes up after 8.00, having found that she has forgotten to set the alarm clock. Her flatmates have already gone, and there is no time for breakfast. She rushes out of the house and reaches the bus stop just as the bus is disappearing around the corner. She half runs, half walks to work, but it is already 8.45 when she reaches the clinic. She is 15 minutes late.

Questions

1. Identify and list Donna’s time management problems.
2. List five strategies and explain how Donna could use these to overcome her time management problems.
3. Please print the case study (printer friendly version) and bring it to the next elluminate session with your answers for a group discussion.

Contributors

• Marc Doesburg, Otago Polytechnic, 2006
• David McQuillan, Otago Polytechnic, 2007

Adapted from: Thoreau, M., & Ellis, J. (2001). Communication in Practice Auckland: Pearson Education NZ Ltd.

Business Case - Procrastination and Office Etiquette

Sunshine Products Limited (SPL) is a manufacturer of Luggage and Suitcases, with head office at Mumbai and branches at Delhi, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Hyderabad branch is headed by Branch Manager, Raghu, who is also responsible for all day-to-day reporting of the branch. There are around 15 employees in the branch office, with many of them (around 9) in sales. There is one Accountant, one office assistant, one dispatch clerk, one Administration executive and one MIS executive, who is responsible for collating data and sending reports to top management, in Mumbai, after the approval of Raghu.

Raghu has been recently married and hence he is usually late to the office but as he is the Branch head, no other employee can complain. As soon as he reaches the office, the first thing Raghu does is check his mailbox and see if there was any important mail from Head office. Because he is a branch manager, he gets lots of emails from Head office and from the franchisees as the company has retail stores managed by franchisees. He gets around 60-70 mails per day as soon as he reaches the office. So, now he reached the office and saw that there was a mail from his CEO, asking him to call him by 9:30 am and he had reached the office only at 11! So, he decided a strategy and sent a text to his CEO, Vikrant, saying, “Sir, I am sorry I could not call you as my wife is hospitalized. Can I call you now”. Seeing the message, Vikrant called himself called him and regretted about his wife’s illness and asked Raghu to send him an urgent report on quarterly sales by 5:30 pm. Raghu was relaxed after hearing that Vikrant was not angry with him and he asked his office assistant to bring him a coffee. Raghu started working on the report but when he could just input one entry, he realized that the MIS Executive Srikanth would be able to do this work, so he called for Srikanth. Srikanth took the information and went back to his desk. Meanwhile, Raghu opened his Facebook account and started exploring the web. He used to remind himself every-day that he would not do so but then he thought that 10-15 minutes on Facebook are ok. But by the time he logged out of Facebook it was 1 pm and then he realized that he had to meet all Sales staff at 12:30 to get their weekly updates. 

He hurriedly called for the sales team, but they had already left for their field work. He then asked the Administration Executive to call all the sales staff and asked them to have a meeting with him at 5:30 in the evening. He saw his mailbox again and he had to reply to at least 15 mails urgently. He was unable to decide which emails to reply to first, so he thought of taking a walk outside the office for some smoke. He came back and replied to 3-4 mails. Around 4 pm, Raghu realized that he had to send a report to Vikrant by 5:30 so he asked to cancel the meeting with the sales team. He then called Srikanth to understand the progress of the report. Srikanth was astonished and he said, “You didn’t tell me to give this report today! You didn’t give me time at all. I was doing something else, and I need at least 4 hours to do it!”. Hearing his, Raghu got angry and shouted at Srikanth and   thought of making the report himself. He copied some data from earlier reports and added some new data and sent it to Vikrant. Within the next 30 minutes he got a stern mail from Vikrant, accusing him of sending false data. Meanwhile, his sales team was laughing when they heard that their meeting was postponed for the next day as they were used to Raghu being like that.