Research Articles

Management Time - Who's got the Monkey?

Bob Selden, director of the National Learning Institute

How come you've worked hard all day but haven't started the one task that was most important to you? How come your daily work schedule often falls in a heap by mid-morning?

Who's got the monkey? The answer is, you have - probably several!

"Management Time: Who's got the Monkey"(1) has been the second most popular article ever published by the Harvard Business Review and has been reprinted several times. We've summarised its content to provoke some reflective thought.

William Oncken and Donald Wass suggested that there are three types of management-imposed time pressure - Boss, System, and Self.

Boss-imposed time pressure
Activities, which must be accomplished, or we'll suffer the consequences!
System-imposed time pressure
Those activities/requests which come from peers and colleagues. The penalties are not so severe or as swift, but we may still suffer if these things are not done.
Self-imposed time pressure
Those activities we ourselves initiate or agree to do - particularly those things which have been upwardly delegated from people who report to us. These activities impact heavily on our discretionary time, and the penalty for not doing these is stress.


Oncken and Wass used the monkey analogy to make their point. When someone in our team talks about a "problem" they want to "run past us", the monkey (in other words, the problem) is very clearly on their back. But when we respond with something like "Well, I haven't got time right now, but leave it with me", the monkey immediately leaps from their shoulders to ours. We have just been on the receiving end of an excellent piece of upward delegation.

If this happens to you every day, you'll soon be carrying a cagefull of monkeys on your back. Not only have you reduced your discretionary time, you also must feed and care for the monkeys you've acquired.

The secret is to reduce the pressure of self-imposed activities to give us more discretionary time. You can then use this time to become more productive with our boss and the system.

How do you avoid catching monkeys and give yourself more discretionary time? The first step is to recognise that the monkeys are jumping onto your back!

Use the following checklist to see whether you are a collector of monkeys:

The monkey has just jumped. Too late!
How often do I say . . . Always Often Occassionally Seldom Never
"Leave it with me"
"Can I think about that?"
"I'll get back to you on that"
"I've seen something like that a thousand times. I'll look after it for you"
"I'll get Bob to look after that"
"Send me an e-mail on that will you?"
"Don't you worry about it"
The monkey is about to jump. Beware!
How often do I say . . . Always Often Occassionally Seldom Never
"Let me know if you have trouble"
"You know you don't have to do it that way"
"I've never seen anything quite like that before"
"I remember when that happened to . . . "
"I think my last boss had something like that happen to him/her"

How did you score? If you found yourself ticking a number of "always" or "often" columns, then chances are you need to be careful about taking on too many monkeys. Think about what you should and can do, then what others could do for you. Remember, developing your people to take responsibility will provide you with more discretionary time to devote to other activities.

(1) "Management Time: Who's got the Monkey", by William Oncken and Donald Wass, Harvard Business Review, 1974