Time Tips: Remember Your Purpose

Don't lose sight of your real purpose. If you are the most efficient person in the world and yet the sum of your efforts defeats your larger purpose, your time is simply wasted. Think about this experiment, and apply the lessons to your own life.

A group (let's call them ACME) did a study at a seminary. This involved seminary students (seminarians), each approached separately. The seminarians were to give sermons on the Good Samaritan.

Not all of our readers are from Western culture, so here's a summary of that story (which is from the New Testament). In the time of Christ, people who lived in Samaria were deemed low-lifes by the mainstream folks. If you've read redneck jokes, you get a feel for how Samarians were thought of in those days. An injured man lay by the side of the road, and all of the "good" people walked past him and left him there. But, a Samaritan stopped and gave the man extensive assistance.

At the seminary, ACME called each of the seminarians one at a time. "Sorry, there's been a scheduling error. We need you to give your sermon ten minutes from now. You'll have to hurry to make it here in time."

Without exception, each of the seminarians walked around, or stepped over, an actor hired by ACME to play an injured man in need of assistance.

This was an object lesson. The seminarians were so caught up in meeting an obligation to talk about helping a stranger that they neglected to live the very words they were supposed to speak.

How well do you manage your time?

As a parent, do you yell at your kids to get them to soccer practice on time?
As a husband, do you snarl at your wife for making you late to the play you are taking her as a treat?
As a wife, "correct" your husband when he (unlike most men, unfortunately) "helps out" with domestic chores such as cooking, cleaning, vacuuming, and so on?
As a spouse, do you let yourself get out of shape so you are less attractive to your mate?
As an employee, do you undermine your relationship with your boss in any of the hundreds of ways people find to do this?
As a boss, do you undermine morale by forgetting they are people who need your leadership, example, and support?
As a neighbor, do you get into petty disputes with your neighbors--thereby devaluing an important aspect of your home?

You can come up with many other examples and situations. Remember that when you sacrifice the larger goal to meet immediate needs, you are usually shooting yourself in your proverbial foot. Take better aim.

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.