ABSTRACT
Published studies of the activities of the manager * assume that his day consists of a sequence of ‘episodes’ each having a known duration and being capable of classification in a number of different ways. One episode ends and another begins whenever the classification — by any of the ways — changes. Numbers of episodes, or the total time of the episodes classified in the same way, can be compared with the same measures of other classifications. Importance is then assumed to be proportional to these measures, and if this assumption is true, the data provides a profile of a particular manager’s job which can be compared with expectations, or with the profile of another manager’s job.
