Time Management: Critical Traps and Escape Strategies for School Administrators in Colleges of Education in North Western Nigeria

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This paper examined time traps that affect School administrators in Colleges of Education in North-Western Nigeria as well as escape strategies, which they use in their attempt at time management. This study adopted a simple descriptive survey. The population of the study was made up of School administrators in 13 Colleges of Education out of which 10 were deliberately sampled from the seven states in North Western Nigeria which include Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara State. The Colleges comprised of five Federal and five State Colleges of Education. In each College, 200 School administrators were purposefully selected out of 380. A self-designed structured and validated questionnaire titled: "Time Traps and Escape strategies Questionnaire” (TTESQ) was used to collect dated. The instrument was pilot-tested and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient at 0.05 level of significance and it had a reliability index of 0.76.It was based on a five-point Likert scale. The data was analyzed using summative rating scale otherwise called weighted mean whereby the mean score of 2.50 and above was used as cut off for agreement while below 2.50 was used to decide disagreement. The findings of the study indicated that School administrators in Colleges of Education in North-Western Nigeria were affected by various kinds of time traps which include management by crisis, communication overload, drop in visitors, lack of delegation, multi-tasking and lack of use of time management tools among others. They tend to hold negative assumptions that affect their efforts at time management. Many of them were found not to use time management tools for escape strategies. It was recommended that executive workshops on time management be organized for School administrators using multi-disciplinary and multimedia approaches to help them to improve on their time management skills.