'People who would never think of committing suicide think nothing of dribbling life away in useless minutes and hours every day.'
Thomas Carlyle
It's time to get a handle on time! Next to your health and well-being, time is your most precious resource. You can always make more money, but you can't create a single second more.
Activity management and the effective use of time are great contributors to a healthy well-being. Feeling that our time and activities are out of our control adversely affects our ability to manage work and life.
When I ask people what holds them back from achieving more, doing more, having more, and being more, one of the first answers I get is, 'I would, if I could only find the time!' This is especially true if we're so busy doing that we don't take enough time to plan the doing. We have so much to do that we often sacrifice the being for the doing.
Time is money. Time is life! We can schedule activities, but time marches on. Wilfredo Pareto gave us his Pareto Principle: the 80/20 Rule. He stated that we invest 80% of our time into activities that produce only 20% of our effectiveness and results. Conversely, 20% of our efforts produce 80% of our results. If Pareto is right, for every 1% improvement in your time efficiency (the 20%), you can produce a 4% enhancement in your effectiveness (the 80%).
The tycoon John Wanamaker once said, 'I know 50% of my advertising works, and 50% doesn't. The problem is, I don't know which 50% is which!' This is an apt analogy for Pareto's Principle. If we figure out which 20% of our actions are producing 80% of our results, we can begin to invest more of our time into these activities, and quite possibly make a geometric leap in our effectiveness.
Here are some keys points about time management:
- Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.
Don't be efficient at the expense of effectiveness. If you're not doing the right things, does it matter how efficiently you do them? As you begin to paint your 'house' with more effective time control, make sure your ladder's up against the right wall! It's not how many things you do that matters, but which ones.
- Be efficient with things and effective with people.
Effective use of time includes doing the things that matter to you: the activities that fulfill your personal values, mission, purpose, and primary aim. Decide what's really important to you and invest more of your time in activities that lead to the outcomes you want. The same thing goes for how you invest your time with people.
We feel great frustration when we do things that are unimportant, or engage in activities that have no payoff for us. We consider this a waste of time, and thus a waste of life. We get our highest sense of accomplishment when we do something important to us-especially if what's important to us helps another.
- Organize your time and life around priorities.
First, identify the roles you play-parent, spouse, business owner, civic leader, and so forth. Then set goals in each of these areas. Organize and schedule your week in blocks of time around your primary roles and goals, and arrange your appointments according to your life priorities.
Like everything else in life that's dynamic, be flexible and adaptable with your time and activities. Here's the key: Schedule by working backward from the results and outcomes you want. If you know your roles and goals, you can always check to see if you're working toward them and using your time effectively.
- Avoid these major time traps:
- Procrastination (often caused by fear, indecision, anxiety about outcomes, or unclear priorities)
- Time wasters (telephone tag, unconfirmed appointments, poor planning and scheduling, numerous and unnecessary meetings, interruptions by other people, over-commitment, perfectionism, and an inability to delegate)
- Paperwork and clutter (Use the three Ds: Do it, Delegate it, or Discard it.)
- Goal diffusion-too many things going on at once (Incompletion and 'open-endedness' drain energy, but task completion and closure generate it. Ask yourself today, 'What must I stop doing, start doing, or continue to completion?'
- Use an activity priority system to manage time and activities:
- Absolutely must be done-highest payoff, value
- Better be done - top priority
- Can be done-but only after As and Bs
- Delegate-someone else should do it (for an hourly rate)
- Eliminate-not important at all, so don't do it!
- Take these three action steps with each activity or project:
- Complete it-high value in finishing and bringing closure
- Defer it-can't finish now, so set a deadline and come back to it
- Abandon it-no longer want or value it, not important.
Just because you start something, doesn't mean you must finish it-especially if it no longer serves your mission, purpose, or value.
- Take a longer time perspective.
You'll mimimize the pressure to perform and get everything done 'today' if you can see each activity in the longer view.
- Maintain focus and concentration of effort; do one thing at a time.
This is very challenging in today's multitask world. Do your best to limit distractions, diversions, interruptions, and diffusion of energy. Focus on the vital few (20%), not the trivial many (80%). When using a top-10 to-do list, keep in mind that the top two activities will usually have greater value than the other eight combined.
As an individual producer, one hour of your effort yields one 'unit' of result. As a manager or leader, you can leverage your efforts through others. One hour of management or leadership, working with and through other people, can leverage your efforts 10 times or 100 times. Who can you team up with this week to leverage your efforts and results?
We come back full circle to leverage-ability. How can you lift yourself up and leverage each moment, minute, hour, and day this week?
Here are three worksheets from my time- and activity-management program that will help you get focused, more efficient, and more effective. make copies of these worksheets as you need them.
WORKSHEET 1: APPLICATION EXERCISE
Be more attentive to and rigorous about how you invest your time and engage in activities. Follow what your instincts tell you are vital and valuable to you. Don't invest so much time in what's urgent to everyone else; leave a little time for what's important to you.
Complete a to-do list, but with a new focus. Rank your activities, creating a 'values hierarchy' by comparing each one with the others. This gives you a true priority list. Instead of doing the easy items just so you can cross them off your list, work on the most important item first. It's likely that if you accomplish only the first thing on your list, it will yield more than four or five of the lesser-value items.
Stay focused on your first two priorities this week, and see how your productivity and effectiveness compares to last week. If you work on your most important to-do, continue until complete. Even if you accomplish nothing else this week, I guarantee that it will be one of the more productive weeks you'll have experienced in a long time.
Using this worksheet, you can also figure out your hourly compensation rate. Then focus your efforts on activities that pay you this rate or more.
Create a to-do-list of 10 items to complete this week. Prioritize them:
My duties in order of importance (most important on top):
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
- _______________________________________________________
Work on No. 1 and continue until complete.
How I will revise my time management to become more productive:
- Effectiveness vs. efficiency: _____________________________________________
- Take a longer time perspective: __________________________________________
- Focus (concentrated vs. diffused): ________________________________________
- Leverage my efforts: __________________________________________________
- Keep a time log for 30 days: (see Worksheet 2: Time and Activity Chart)
What is my actual hourly compensation rate?
$__________ (income) X ______ (hours worked) = $______ per hour
How will I focus on activities that pay me this rate or higher?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
WORKSHEET 2: TIME AND ACTIVITY CHART
Use this worksheet to allocate your time more efficiently and effectively. It will be a real eye-opener if you track the actual time you spend in these activities for at least one week, preferably 14 to 30 days. Don't make yourself crazy tracking every minute. At the end of each day, just invest five minutes to review how you spent your time in these areas.
At the end of the tracking period, you'll have a good feel for how you use your time. You can then decide how to allocate it better by increasing or decreasing time spent in each activity. Redirect a few minutes here, reallocate a half-hour there, and pretty soon you'll be investing more time in the areas that really matter to you.
How to use this chart:
- Estimate current hours per week spent in activity. To be more accurate, record your actual time spent in these activities for 14 or 30 days.
- Rank activities in the boxes on left; you'll see how you're currently using time.
- Write in the desired hours per week you want to spend.
- Indicate whether an increase (+) or decrease (-) in time spent is warranted.
- Start to reallocate your time and re-schedule your activities a little each week.
How I will allocate my time more effectively:
Activity Current Hours Desired Hours/Week +/- Hours/Week
Appointments _____________ __________________ __________
Telephone _____________ __________________ __________
Marketing _____________ __________________ __________
Follow-up _____________ __________________ __________
Preparation _____________ __________________ __________
Meetings _____________ __________________ __________
Service _____________ __________________ __________
Read/Study _____________ __________________ __________
Travel _____________ __________________ __________
Mail _____________ __________________ __________
Administrative ____________ __________________ __________
Down time _____________ __________________ __________
Think time _____________ __________________ __________
Other _____________ __________________ __________
WORKSHEET 3: COACHING
This is your self-coaching guide. Make copies of this page and use it at the end of every week to track your progress. It will help you frame a more effective time-management strategy, and help you to identify and find the coaching you need to make time your ally.
Time Objectives to Meet:
- View time as your most precious resource.
- Define your values, mission, and purpose.
- Identify the important roles and goals in your life.
- Focus on important activities and reduce the time spent on urgent matters.
- Avoid major time traps and minimize time-wasters and procrastination.
- Design an activity system to focus on highest-priority tasks.
- Make time each day to self-coach.
Weekly Journal: Week of ________________
Time objective I worked on this week:
The method I implemented:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
How I used it:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
My outcome or result:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
What worked successfully:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
What I will do differently:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
My next step:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
The coaching I want:
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
My next follow-up date: ______________
THE BOTTOM LINE
Time is precious. Invest your time this week to focus on high-payoff activities, minimize procrastination and time wasters, avoid time traps, and create a time and activity management approach to finish strong this year. This will set the tone for a highly effective work year-maybe your best year ever. Spend at least 15 minutes every day thinking about how you can enhance your time leverage-ability, expand your opportunities, and capitalize on your personal talents and business assets.
Be accountable to yourself. Each day, actively implement one time strategy or activity-management method. Remember, a slight improvement in efficiency can yield a fourfold increase in effectiveness. This means you can leverage your efforts dramatically, enhance performance, and increase profit simply by making small adjustments and revisions in the use of your time. Make these minor changes for the rest of this year, and watch your results and productivity skyrocket.