Time Study

• In ESG’s 2018 report “The Life of Cybersecurity Professionals,” 36% of participants expressed the overwhelming workload was a stressful aspect of their job.
• Organizations expect a lot from their security specialists. From monitoring the threat environment, protecting business assets, and learning new tools, to keeping up with IT initiatives, cybersecurity teams struggle to balance their responsibilities with the constant emergencies and disruptions that take them away from their primary tasks.
• Businesses fail to recognize the challenges associated with task prioritization and the time management practices of a security professional.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• The majority of scheduled calendar meetings include employees and peers.
  • Our research indicates cybersecurity professionals spent the majority of their meetings with employees (28%) and peers (24%). Other stakeholders involved in meetings included by myself (15%), boss (13%), customers (10%), vendors (8%), and board of directors (2%).
• Calendar meetings are focused on project work, management, and operations.
  • When asked to categorize calendar meetings, the focus was on project work (26%), management (23%), and operations (22%). Other scheduled meetings included ones focused on strategy (15%), innovation (9%), and personal time (5%).
• Time management scores were influenced by the percentage of time spent with employees and peers.
  • When participants were divided into good and poor time managers, we found good time managers spent less time with their peers and more time with their employees. This may be due to the nature of employee meetings being more directly tied to the project outputs of the manager than their peer meetings. Managers who spend more time in meetings with their employees feel a sense of accomplishment, and hence rate themselves higher in time management.

Impact and Result

• Understand how cybersecurity professionals allocate their time.
• Gain insight on whether perceived time management skills are associated with calendar maintenance factors.
• Identify common time management pain points among cybersecurity professionals.
• Identify current strategies cybersecurity professionals use to manage their time.