Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola

Productivity Case Histories | Productivity improvement articles | Time Tips Articles
 

Productivity Knowledge Base: Organize with Building Blocks

Time Management Training: Organize Your Time With The Building Blocks of Productivity

By Denise Landers,http://www.keyorganization.com/cds.asp

What lessons you can learn from small children! One day I was watching two youngsters, ages 3 and 5, playing with “bricks” constructed out of heavy cardboard. The brick blocks came in three sizes: a 10” x 16” rectangle, a 10” square, and the standard 3” x 10” brick size.

They spent hours creating structures. At the beginning, there was no understanding of larger pieces providing a stronger foundation for the smaller pieces and so things would come tumbling down without using all of the bricks. With lots of trial and error, the children discovered that if they started with the biggest size, they were more likely to be able to use all of the bricks.

An effective daily schedule can also be constructed with three types of blocks. How much you can pile on (your productivity) each day depends on how well you organize your time.

Large Blocks – Your Day’s Foundation

Make your day’s foundation an uninterrupted block of time when you can focus on difficult, involved projects. The ideal length is an hour and a half, approximately twenty percent of an eight-hour day. If you cannot possibly find that length of time, try for an hour. Even with 45 minutes of uninterrupted time you can get a significant amount of work completed because you are not requiring twenty additional minutes after each interruption to get back into the “flow.” As you develop this routine, aim for the hour and a half each day.

During this time, do not answer every phone call. Turn off your general email alerts. If you want to ensure that a certain person or message gets through immediately, set up your software rules to notify you of that specific message. When you can block twenty percent of your time, you will accomplish about eighty percent of your work for the day.

You recognize instinctively that having uninterrupted time is effective when you arrive at work an hour early or stay for a couple of extra hours at the end of a day, knowing you will get so much done in that quiet time. Why not become more productive by including that quiet time within your day instead of adding extra hours in order to get the same amount of work done?

Medium Blocks (Grouping Blocks) -- Multi-Tasking Isn’t Always The Best Option

Group as many like activities as possible since you are four times more productive when you can focus on one type of task rather than switching back and forth among assorted tasks. Constant multi-tasking slows you down. Activities that can be grouped include returning non-urgent telephone calls, processing your email inbox, filing, and reading.

The length of this session depends on the work. If you average about five phone calls at a time, you may only need to block out ten to fifteen minutes. With email, you might need to spend thirty minutes at a time. Any of these can be repeated during the day. For instance, you might quickly check your email first thing in the morning for ten minutes to handle urgent issues, then spend thirty minutes before lunch and thirty minutes again later in the afternoon. Stick to the amount of time that you have originally allotted rather than letting it trail on. That will keep you focused on the task at hand and will increase your productivity. Move what you do not complete to the next block of time.

Small Blocks – The New Items and Lower Priority Tasks To Be Handles

New items and lower priority tasks can be worked on between the other blocks. These might include requests for help from a colleague, quick answers to questions, filling out forms, and other project components that did not fit into your major blocks, but that you still have time to work on.

Structuring each day starts with locating a space for that large block, followed by several medium blocks of grouped activities. Small blocks are then added. If you do the reverse, which means coming in to work and clearing out the small items before you find a time for the most important work, you may wrap up the day without handling your priorities.

Why spend extra hours in the evenings on work that you could have fit into the day with the right construction of your schedule?

 

About the Author

As a productivity trainer, organizing specialist, and owner of Key Organization Systems, Inc., Denise Landers has spent years speaking, training, consulting, and coaching on the topics of time management and effective workflow. If you’d like to attend an organizing seminar but do not have the time, Landers now provides you with the full benefits of corporate training in managing time, paper, and email while listening at your own convenience. Get The Productivity Series at:http://www.keyorganization.com/cds.asp

 

 

 

More thoughts on time management

The phrase "time management" is an unfortunate language quirk. You can't really manage time. It just is. You can't gain time, create time, or even lose time. Time is what it is, regardless of what we do. And, paradoxically, many common "time management" techniques and practices are timewasters because they divert limited resources (such as time) to the wrong things.

It would be better to say "time allocation" or "activity management" "time usage" or some other phraseology to indicate that it's not time itself you're managing but how you use the time that exists. But we'll use the common terminology here to avoid confusion.

Some things time management is not:

  • Being more efficient. Suppose you become very efficient at making buggy whips. Does this fact mean you are managing your time well?
  • Getting more done in a given amount of time. Getting more done of what? And to what degree of quality? If you rake the leaves on a lawn from one side to the other all day long, does that mean you are a good time manager?
  • Being able to juggle multiple priorities. Instead of juggling priorities, assign priorities. First tend to the urgent things, then the most important things.
  • Mastering multi-tasking. This concept conflicts with what we know about the human brain. If you buy into this self-defeating, time-wasting, quality-killing ideology, you might also be interested in practicing solo flight by flapping your arms frantically.
  • Working faster. No, this mode is how you make mistakes that you subsequently have to spend more time fixing.

Some things good time management involves:

  • Deciding what to do. This is trickier than it sounds. Which is why there are time management experts.
  • Deciding what not to do. This is even trickier than deciding what to do. Which is why there are time managers and why discipline is a huge, huge factor in accomplishing this.
  • Deciding what to do when, and in what order. In essence, prioritization.
  • Determining the scope, goals, and metrics for each activity you undertake. In this area, we the find most room for improvement. Precision here allows you to avoid waste on the one hand, and falling short on the other.
  • Planning out the work, task, project, or activity such that you determine the necessary steps to quality completion. That is, what must you do to meet the intended goal and quality metrics?
  • Identifying unnecessary steps. Get this right, and you can cut your wasted hours significantly.
  • Figuring out what resources to use. Not all resources applicable to a task are equal. Picking the right tool for the job saves time, improves quality, and makes life less stressful.

We've highlighted only some of the factors involved in good time management. We actually teach extreme time management, which is a methodology that allows you to make effective use of your time almost second nature. You don't need a complicated system. Our system puts many of the variables on autopilot, so you have more time to do what you need to do. Our system goes way beyond most other systems in results, yet is far simpler.

Contact us for a presentation to your organization: comments @ mindconnection.com (remove the spaces after pasting into your e-mail client's "to" box.