Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Prioritizing #3

As a youngster, you probably heard your parents tell you to "get your priorities straight." It's amazing how quickly we forget this when going about our daily activities.

How often are you distracted by things that don't move your agenda forward, and then wonder why you seem to have run out of time? If you're not sure, take notes on this for just half a day. The results may surprise you. If you are "normal" and honest about it, the results will shock you. And you will find huge opportunities for freeing up time you can use more wisely than you presently do.

Here are some questions to get you thinking about this exercise.

  • Do you reach for the phone, simply because it rings?
  • Do you respond to an e-mail, simply because it's in your In box, or do you shuttle it to a ToDo folder for later?
  • Do you engage in "polite conversation" until your next appointment is almost upon you?
  • When faced with more than one activity to do, is your choice based on which one really matters more or on something else?
  • Is your day fragmented by interruptions and low-value tasks?
  • When your mail arrives, do you open every piece or quickly pull out the urgent mail and save the rest for later?
  • Do you eat "fast food" in an effort to save time? If so, you are actually wasting time--huge, painful, expensive swaths of time. Not only do you take an immediate performance hit, but you are ensuring you will have medical problems and loss of function that you would not otherwise have.

Life is about choices. Make them wisely, and you will avoid wasting the limited time you have. You must be proactive about this. Letting the choices make themselves is also a choice--and it's one that leads to poor results.

 

 
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.