Excerpts from Our Time Management Course
How to get 72 hours of work done in 8 hours

Let’s start off with a true story. A high achiever works in an office with a more senior employee. This high achiever actually accomplishes more work in one day than this other fellow does in three months. That’s a 90:1 ratio. This occurs because the other fellow is a gross underachiever. By studying their respective methods, you can see what to do and what not to do. In any case, it is quite possible to get the 9:1 ratio referred to in the headline—this one case alone exceeds that by 1,000%!

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Here are the secrets to warp-speed working:

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Define what you are trying to accomplish

Let’s look at each of these in turn. The two people in question are actually editors. Let’s call the efficient one Larry and the inefficient one Shemp. Larry knows exactly what his job is, and he focuses on it. He avoids tasks that do not make that job happen. Shemp has a fixation about making compost piles of paper, moving office furniture around, and doing all sorts of needless activities in an effort to show how hard he works. Shemp forgets his mission is to get quality product out the door.

Larry reviews his own work, having made a point of learning the insider secrets to doing his craft. Shemp, on the other hand, doesn’t have the time to review his work. So, he turns in work that is unacceptably poor. Shemp’s idea of his job is he must "manage paper." Larry’s idea is he must produce quality editorial content. Both men accomplish what they set out to do.

If you are a project manager, your job is to turn out a quality project on time, and on budget. If you focus on the minutiae of your various charts and graphs or some other details and do not actively manage the flow of work, you will be successful as a manager of minutiae but not as a project manager. Thus, if you spend 39 hours with your charts and 1 hour with the work each 40-hour week, you will get—at most—1 hour of real work done. If you spend 5 hours of each 40-hour week working with the charts and 35 managing the work, then you could get 35 hours of work done. That’s a 35:1 ratio. You might spend an additional 10 hours with correspondence, etc.

The biggest trap people fall into is confusing the ends with the means. You must eat to live, but if you live to eat, you will have obesity-related health problems. If you play with your charts to get the work done, fine. However, if you think your job is to manage the charts instead of the project, your project will not be a stunning success.

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Examine each activity to see whether it contributes to your goal (doing the right things)

Larry has a special slot in his hanging mail contraption for outgoing mail. He takes his mail to the mail drop-off whenever he passes by it, but never makes a special trip. Shemp, on the other hand, has so many piles of paper, he must take individual correpsondence to the mail drop-off as soon as he’s ready to mail it. Shemp makes several trips a day to the mail drop-off, while Larry never really makes one. Thus, the company pays Shemp to walk its halls, while paying Larry to edit its articles.

What you are looking for are the value-added and non-value-added activities. The simpler your system of doing things, the better. Shemp puts every article on multiple floppies, and prints out every edit of each article. Naturally, he has to make individual trips to the printer. Larry, on the other hand, keeps all of his articles on one zip drive, as well as on his hard drive. He keeps and manages no collection of floppies and folders, while Shemp spends several hours each week doing so.

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Examine each activity to see if you can do it more efficiently (doing things right)

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A huge time-waster is meetings. I am on the board of an organization that had 4-hour meetings each Saturday. Some more efficiency-minded people got these down to three. When I go to one of the meetings, I tell people I am leaving in one hour—and I do it. They know to have the real meeting in one hour. Most meetings are 15 minutes stretched to several hours. Don’t make that mistake. Some meeting tips:....