Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Perfection Vs. Progress

One reason people "don't have enough time" is they will squander a huge chunk of it on a minor task because there's nothing urgent going on. For example, they'll stretch a 10 minute call to an hour or try to do a nonessential task perfectly. This precludes them from accomplishing other tasks.

The cure for this is to set up blocks of time. If you do an online search for "time management" and then search inside the results for "Mark Lamendola," you'll find a few articles written by researchers quoting me on this. The concept is explained in those articles.

Here's a bit more explanation about why you shouldn't keep working on a task until you've done it perfectly. It doesn't matter. That's why. Many people will say, "But I have such high standards." What they are really saying is they have low standards. When you are so afraid of your own incompetence that you keep going over something looking for errors, what happens? You get far less done. An example will illustrate.

Let's say your job is to install electrical receptacles in homes being built. If you install them per convention, you can easily keep up with the builders and everyone is happy. The receptacles are a tad crooked (up to 5 degrees off plumb), vary in height from the floor by 1/16th of an inch, and have other variations. For example, the amount of wire  coming out of the cable to feed each receptacle varies between 6 inches and 9 inches. In short, they are not perfect. But, you put these in very fast--about 4 per hour. They are "good enough."

Suppose Gary comes along and says you do shoddy work. Gary gets out a laser device and precisely installs each receptacle within 0.005 degrees of plumb, mounts them within 0.001 inches of each other, and provides 6.125 inches of wire inside each one. Gary can install one of these suckers about every  3 hours.

Will a homeowner even notice the difference? Is there any functional difference? No to both questions. Is Gary doing a better job? No. Gary is doing a far worse job, because one quality factor is time itself. That really matters to the contractor building the homes. With Gary's "perfect" installation ("good enough" isn't good enough for him), the contractor can't complete the houses efficiently.

To do a job right, first define the purpose of the job. Then, define the quality criteria that serve that purpose. Going beyond that isn't delivering more--it's delivering less.
 
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.