Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Predefine to Save Time

Define what you are trying to accomplish

Let's look at two people who have different approaches to goal setting. The two people in question are 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 editorial product out the door. But then, he does not really know what quality editorial product is, because he has been too busy with fruitless activity to have the time to learn what it is.

Larry reviews his own work, having made a point of learning the insider secrets of editing, writing, and producing quality editorial product. Shemp, on the other hand, doesn't have the time to review his work. So, he turns in work that is unacceptably poor. Shemp measures his value as an employee by how much activity he engages in, so he is not even aware there is a problem. 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., and end up with a 45 hour week. But, you will be 35 times as effective as the person who spends only 1 hour a week working the project and 54 hours doing other things. In those 35 hours, you can raise product quality, manage more projects, enhance customer satisfaction, add scope (read, "revenue") to a project, and generally shine as a project manager. Your paper-shuffling counterpart will succeed on luck alone-if at all.

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.

 

 
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.