Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Problem Handling Tip #1

How much time do you spend addressing problems? Probably more than you care to.

A former acquaintance of mine wasn't very disciplined.

She was often late to work, due to car problems. But the car she owned was a model that topped the J.D. Powers Quality Surveys. So, it wasn't the car that was the problem. She didn't do the normal maintenance on the vehicle. She had put nearly 50,000 miles on it without even one change of oil and filter, for example.

When the engine finally failed, her brother removed the valve cover and I looked inside. It wasn't pretty. That engine contained more sludge than a Congressman's promises.

Her brother removed the engine guts, and we could not find one part that was spared from being burnt, scored, or otherwise damaged.

She should have invested some time maintaining her car, rather than having the engine freeze up on the Interstate while she was rushing to make an important appointment.

Now the issue with problems isn't so much the total time involved in maintenance vs. failure. It's really about the timing of the failure. For example, it takes a great deal of time to service a commercial jet. All those hundreds of hours of downtime constitute lost revenue. Wouldn't it make sense to just fix a failure when it happens? Well, not at 30,000 feet! And therein lies the defeat of every argument for "saving time" by putting off important preventive activities. They say time is money. Well, they also say you have to spend (invest) money to make money.

Don't let the seeming inconvenience of necessary maintenance put you in a position of disaster from a failure. Here are some items you should review to see if you are investing enough time in them:

  • Career. Why do people wait until they are laid off before updating their skills and contributing to their professional network? Do it now.
  • Children. Parents who don't invest in their young children deal with mind-boggling and heart-breaking problems as those kids get older.
  • Exercise. It's not about living longer. It's about having mobility and less pain. If you don't have an exercise program now, you'll spend time in pain and Depends, later. The quality of your program is also important. See http://www.supplecity.com for free information.
  • Friends. Why do you not hear from some people until they are down on their luck? We're all very busy, and it's easy to take your friends for granted. Don't.
  • Home. Do the maintenance required on all the systems in your home. Your HVAC filter, furnace maintenance, lawn, trees, etc. Make a list.
  • Neighbors. The people living around you can be enormous assets to your personal security and quality of life. Invest time in them, even if doing so is inconvenient--it really pays off.
  • Parents. If you have living parents, do you make time for them? After they're gone, it'll be too late.
  • Yourself. What are you doing for self-improvement? This isn't a process you can rush. Do a little bit fairly often, and eventually you'll come a long way. Like Don B. (one of our subscribers) has done.

 

 
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.