Learning Engineering Practice

Chapter 19

Time management

One of the most influential factors in an engineer’s success is time management. As an engineer, you will have many competing demands on your time. Like many engineers, you may feel that most of these are ‘interruptions’ or other demands that impede your ‘real engineering’ work.

Here’s how Leslie Perlow, author of the book Time Famine, described this:

I found that engineers distinguish between ‘real engineering’ and ‘everything else’ that they did. They defined real engineering as analytical thinking, mathematical modelling, and conceptualising solutions. Real engineering was work that required using scientific principles and independent creativity. It was the technical component of engineers' deliverables that utilise ...