Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Don't Rush #002

Many people believe a sense of urgency is essential to good time management. That's true, when the sense of urgency is in its proper place.

But one of the keys to good time management is removing factors that inhibit concentration and focus. And guess what one of those is? The sense of urgency.

When you can be relaxed for half an hour and really focus on an activity, you enhance your ability to proceed through it competently and efficiently. But when you feel rushed, you are in an altered state that inhibits your ability to think.

The sense of urgency needs to apply when you are:

  • Planning. Which tasks should you combine, simplify, or postpone? For example, you need to stop by the library, the bank, and the grocery store. But you'd also like to check out the new refrigerators because yours is making a noise. And you are getting close to needing a haircut. This weekend, though, your kid is performing in a play. You've got to make some choices, here.
     
  • Scheduling. What items should be done first? For example, you've got a major presentation to give four days from now and you've also got that old comic book collection to sort through. Which item takes precedence?
     
  • Doing gruntwork. Don't piddle. Move quickly. For example, you've got dusting and vacuuming to do. You can make slow, deliberate motions, or you can get your butt in high gear. Racing against the clock makes sense, here.
     
  • Doing "nonproductive" tasks. You see this every day at work. Joe Schmoe, your neighbor in the cubicle farm, seems to spend most of his day filing papers and processing correspondence. He doesn't get much real work done. But you need to handle your snail mails and e-mails quickly and ruthlessly. You need to save your filing for those times you are stuck on the phone with someone you have to entertain (a boss, a customer, that SOB upon whom you depend in Dept ABC, or anyone who puts you on hold). If an activity isn't one your company can charge a customer for and it doesn't take much real concentration, then do that activity as though you just took a major hit of speed.

Outside of these areas, there are few times when feeling the pressure of urgency is helpful. Taking the time to think through a project, rather than just diving into a flurry of activity, is nearly always the most time-saving approach. Engineers know this from experience. It takes less time to design something correctly than to keep going back and trying to correct defects. You may  have heard the saying, "Never enough time to do it right, always enough time to do it over."

As you schedule your various tasks, allow enough time for you to be able to immerse yourself into the task and do it well. Think in terms of carving out "safe" blocks of time for specific tasks. Don't intrude on that time with "multitasking," and don't feel compelled to answer the phone or check e-mail during that time. Seal yourself off from the world for half an hour and  you will be amazed at the results. You can call this the "sequestering method."

Here's an example to emphasize this concept. I once worked as a magazine editor. In our work arrangement, there were two kinds of editors--subject matter and production. I worked in the subject matter area. Our edited pieces would then go to the production editors for final edits.

I always used the sequestering method. I could sit down with an article for an hour, and produce a polished product that our managing editor said needed no further work. That is, she could hand me a piece, get it back later that day, and just plug it in.

She did an experiment (a few times) where she would assign a similar piece to a co"worker" who never used the sequestering method. He was so frantic in his approach, in his race to get it done, that he simply stumbled over himself. It took him several weeks to turn the article around and get it back into her. And when it came back, it needed extensive work. Both his quantity and his quality were way, way, way behind mine.

We tallied things up after my first year on the job. Here's the score:

  • Total articles completed by me: 108; by him: 16. That's a ratio of 6.75:1
  • Total articles that needed no further work--mine, 108; his, 0.

So by providing myself with the time to relax and dig into the job at hand, I produced 108 end products while my coworker produced zero. The company could have hired 107 more people just like him, and I would have outperformed the entire group.

That's not because I worked any faster. I didn't. I worked smarter, and that's what saved me so much time.

 

 
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.