Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Lessons from Congress

Most of us budget our money, but not our time. But simply budgeting your time is not enough. After all, the U.S. Congress has a budget--and look at how they've managed to spend the USA into a $9 trillion hole. (This article first appeared in April of 2006).

This shows how incompetent they are, despite "earning" 5 times as much as their average constituent. It also shows that Congress does not represent the people who allegedly put them in office at voting time (if you vote for an incumbent, you are probably making a huge mistake).

Those of us living in the USA are paying an enormous tuition for lessons in stupidity. Let's not throw that away.

We can apply a few lessons here to time management. If we take some pages from Congress' own playbook, invert the entries from "what not to do," and modify them for time management, we get some very good advice:

  • Figure out what it is you really want to do. You can't do everything or please everyone. So, identify what is your purpose in being. Make everything else support that.
     
  • Determine your resources. Each day has 24 hours (my apologies to astronomers for the lack of precision, there). The typical person needs about a third of them for sleeping (some people need a little less, some a little more--and most of us don't get nearly enough). You cannot get water from a dry well. Once you use up your time, it's gone.
     
  • Ignore the shrill voices. There is no law requiring you to answer the phone just because it rings. There is no law requiring you to stop what you're doing just because someone or something distracts you. You do not have to please those who insist on monopolizing or wasting your time.
     
  • Stick to your principles. Stay true to who you are and the principles you hold. This doesn't mean you can't change your views, opinions, tastes, habits, and so on. But it does mean you should not attempt to change the stripes of the tiger. Surely, you've come to realize your momma didn't raise no fool. You know right from wrong. Let this guide you.
     
  • Don't spend what you don't have. This is a key to time management. Many times, people will spend sleep time, putting them into a counter-productive sleep debt situation. And this debt can actually have a foreclosure--we know this from reams of evidence. For example, there's a spike of traffic deaths and industrial accidents for three weeks following the clock change imposed on us by Daylight Wasting Time. That same foreclosure can happen at any point in the year.
     
  • Don't spend what you don't have (part 2). It's easy to over-commit. The standard response to this is to still try to do everything--and, consequently, do many things poorly. It is far more ethical and productive to back out of a commitment. Simply come clean and say, "I need to resign from this committee. I want to do that, rather than hold the office and do a lousy job. I'm just over-extended."
     
  • Don't spend what you don't have (part 3). When our schedules are too full, it's tempting to shove our responsibilities off on other people. In marriages, this is the norm. Note to men: Wake up! Your wife is not your default task absorber. She has a life, too--respect that. Don't delude yourself into thinking that barely pitching in around the house means you are "sharing" the load.

    Advice for married couples: Make a list of all tasks needed to maintain the home, rear the kids*, and so on. Note the hours required to perform each task. Then, hire an accountant to review the list and provide feedback on who is doing their fair share. Why an accountant? Very simple: This is a matter of resource allocation. And that subject is right up an accountant's alley. If you perform an objective, measured analysis of who is doing what, you will find some eye-popping revelations. It's a bad idea to do this just once--that leads to entrenched expectations and lack of cooperation. Instead, do it twice a year with the goal of seeing if you personally are doing your fair share rather than seeing if your partner needs to do more. You may think this exercise is too cold-hearted, but I don't think it's exactly loving to behave in a way that is unfair to the other person. Get the facts out on the table!

* We rear children, we raise animals--so many people are correct when saying they "raise" their kids. But I will assume our readers actually rear their children to be civilized, responsible adults. 

 

 
A great way many businesses are managing time is using software. There are many forms of time and attendance software which allows managers to track and monitor employees time usage.
 

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.

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.