MPP-3-Time-Management-How-to-Plan-What-to-Do.

Maximizing Personal Productivity Part 3 – Time Management: How to Plan What to Do

MPP-3-Time-Management-How-to-Plan-What-to-Do.

This blog is the third in a series on the topic of “Maximizing Personal Productivity”.  Part 1 & 2 focused on understanding the mindset of time being a fixed resource and on the process required to make decisions that maximize the productive use of time.  In Part 3, we will review how to “Organize” and “Assess” incoming work, as part of the process for making good decisions on how to spend time.

The “Organize” Phase

The “Organize” phase of the process is all about collecting and managing incoming work so that you’ll have a very good understanding of the different choices regarding how to spend your time.  You need a strategy for capturing all the deferred items in one place so you can refer to them later.  During the process of organizing work, you either put a task or commitment to do something on a list somewhere – a list you refer to every day – or you put them in a calendar that you refer to every day.

The “Assess” Phase

The “Assess” phase of the process is all about reviewing your list of deferred items (often stored in a “To Do” list) and planning how to spend your time.  A quote that has really stuck with me is:

“You can anything you want; you just can’t do everything you want” (author unknown).

Know Your Options Then Pick the Best Ones

Don’t try to do everything that comes your way.  Be able to say no (or not now).  This is a lot like financial budgeting.  You identify all of the things you could spend your money on and then you review the list and decide how to spend based on the resources you have.  You make a plan.  The plan is based on identifying what adds the most value.

The “time management” planning process is all about sorting the list (prioritizing) according to the activities that provide the most value in meeting what you want to achieve each day, week, month, etc.  The definition of what is valuable is different for every person and is based on your goals.

In order to be good at managing how you spend your time, you have to know what adds value for you.

Move from Intention to Commitment

Once you have mapped out a plan for how to spend you time, you should move from an intention to a commitment.  A few times each week, get your calendar out and start plugging each activity into it, starting at the top of the list.  If you just work from the planning list, you are more likely to miss important tasks – particularly if they are not really urgent.

Don’t Waste Time on Urgent Tasks that are Not Important

One of the biggest time wasters is spending time on urgent tasks that are not important.  Meetings can be a classic example of this.  If you attend a meeting and at the end of the meeting you don’t feel you got any value or added any value, you just spent time on a low-return activity.  Don’t go to a meeting just because you’re invited.  Go because it adds value to the achievement of the goals you are committed to.

Anticipate Room for Unexpected Urgent Matters

When populating your calendar, remember to leave room for discretionary choices.  If experiences tells you that everyday you spend an hour or two dealing with issues that are urgent and important that require your attention, leave space in your calendar to accommodate this.

Populating your calendar with the prioritized To Do list tasks provides three very important benefits.

  1. It creates a sense of urgency around important tasks so that they don’t get deferred to do less important tasks.
  2. You have a very good idea of what can be accomplished by the end of the day. If there are very important activities on the list that the calendar didn’t have room for, it is much easier and less stressful to deal with that issue at the beginning of the day than at the end of the day.
  3. Possibly the most important benefit is that by committing tasks to a calendar, you increase your focus and your spending can be more carefully measured and analyzed for improvement.

Four Actions for Sorting Work

In the previous blog, I introduced the process for sorting work that involves acting in one of four ways to determine what to do with the incoming opportunity to spend time.

  1. Dismiss it (delete it)
  2. Deal with it (do it now)
  3. Defer it (do it later)
  4. Delegate it

When you have a plan in place and your calendar is populated, choosing which of the four options is best is very straight-forward if you have a clear idea of what is important (what adds value).

Don’t do something because it is urgent, do it because it adds value. 

Planning has to happen on a regular basis.  There is an old adage: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.  Understand your choices and make the most of them.

Part 4 in this series will continue to explore how to maintain your focus.

As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, ACC, CHRL, is a coach and facilitator of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on performance management and effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.

Maximizing Personal Productivity

Maximizing Personal Productivity Part 2 – Developing a Process for Time Management Decision Making

Maximizing Personal Productivity - Time Management Decision Making

This blog is the second in a series on the topic of “Maximizing Personal Productivity”.  Part 1 focused on the importance of understanding that time is a fixed resource and There really is no such thing as “I don’t have time” – there is only “I didn’t decide to spend my time on that!”.  The mindset we need to adopt to be successful centres on choice – we have the power to decide how we spend our time, although it is clear that the choices may sometimes be very difficult.  In order to make good decisions, we need to develop a process that helps clarify which choices most closely align with what we really want to achieve.

There are two key steps to an effective process relating to how you spend your time.  They are:

Step A – Organize and Assess

This step is all about ensuring that you collect and organize all of the requests and opportunities to spend your time and you assess the requests in order to decide what you will spend your time on to provide the greatest return relative to what you want to achieve each day, week, month, etc.

Step B – Focus

This step examines best practices for maintaining your focus on the activity you chose to spend time on.  This step is critical to the maximization of personal productivity.

Let’s look at some important components of Step A – Organize & Assess.  There are two parts to the Organize & Assess process.  The first part involves dealing with incoming time-takers and the second part is all about regular planning.  For this blog, we’ll deal with the first part – managing incoming time takers – and leave the second part for my next blog.

Managing Incoming Work/Play Opportunities

One of the key challenges in managing how you spend your time is managing the volume of incoming work/play opportunities.  Emails, phone calls, meetings, client projects, regular job expectations and personal activities can create an almost overwhelming list of things to do.

To be effective, you need to do the right things right.

As a starting point, you need to have a system to organize all the incoming requests to identify “the right things”.  Choose a system or strategy that you like and can commit to.  Some people use electronic tools while others write lists in journals.  In the end, the best system is one that you are committed to.

Establish a Plan of Action Immediately

The purpose of the system for managing your incoming requests is to ensure that every incoming request for your time is either acted on now, acted on later,  delegated (to someone else) or dismissed.  This is where a tool to organize your list can help.  You need to capture all of the items you’ll act on later in one place so you can refer to them when it is time to act on them.

If you really want an air-tight system for managing future commitments, you need to put them on a list or calendar that you refer to every day.  The routine of keeping and referring to a list or calendar every day is critical to success.

We Often Confuse Urgent with Important

Stephen Covey will be remembered forever for his articulation of the concept of assessing urgency and importance when deciding how to spend your time.  We often confuse urgent with important.  The phone rings and you answer it because it is urgent.  On the other end of the line is a person selling air-duct cleaning, which for most of us is not important.  So, answering the phone was a waste of time.

To be effective we need to do things that are important and avoid doing things that are not important.  Important activities are those which offer the most value in reaching your goals.  We’ll reflect further on the concept of urgent vs. important in the next blog.  However, here’s how it works in the context of the initial filter listed above.

You read an incoming email and have four choices:

  1. Act on it now. You make this choice because it is important and you can deal with it in five minutes or less.  For activities like this, it is more efficient to just do it than to put it on a to do list.
  2. Act on it later. The activity is important and you need to do it at some point.  If you need to do it later in the day or within the next week, the best place to log this activity is in a specific time slot in a calendar.  Otherwise, put it on the to do list.
  3. Delegate it. The activity is important but it isn’t necessary that you do it.  You should target routine tasks that could be done by others.
  4. Dismiss it (delete it). You make this choice because it is not important.

Ok, that’s it.  Simple, right!?  Don’t confuse simple with easy.  The concept is straightforward but the execution is tough.  The next blog in this series will continue to explore the urgent vs important concept in assessing the decisions regarding how to spend your time and will look at a really simple way to think about priority planning.

As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, ACC, CHRL, is a coach and facilitator of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on performance management and effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.

Undertstanding Time Management

Maximizing Personal Productivity Part 1: Understanding Time Management

Undertstanding Time Management

Does it seem like you need to constantly check your smart phone and you feel overwhelmed by too many emails, too many texts, too many phone calls, too many interruptions and the feeling of not having enough time? Then you need to invest a few minutes of time to find out about “Maximizing Personal Productivity – How to Stay Ahead of the Curve”.  This blog is part of a series focusing on simple truths that will help you manage your workload more effectively and spend more time on the things you want to spend time on.

During this series of blogs we are going to explore the mindset and the process required to take control of how you spend your time. We’ll look especially at how to spend time on the things you really want and need to spend time on.

Time Management: Time is a Fixed Resource

Mindset, can be defined as “a set of beliefs or attitudes that a person holds”.  For decades the concept of personal productivity has been primarily labelled “time management”.  This has lead people to think of managing time as a resource in the same way you would manage other resources like finances.  The flaw in this comparison is that time is a fixed resource.  Money is not.  Financial management can involve borrowing extra money to spend now or saving money to spend later. There may be times when you have absolutely no money and no capacity to immediately get any.  Time on that other hand is not a resource to be managed in the same way finances are.  There is always time – it’s just that it is a fixed amount every day, and you have to spend it.

There is No Such Thing as “I Don’t Have Time”

Let me give you an example of how the mindset issue comes into play with leaders and managers who have very challenging workloads. When questioned by a boss or colleague why they didn’t do something that the other person expected them to do, the answer is often “I didn’t have time”.  This answer seems to somehow suggest that the problem is external to the person and is due to a lack of a resource.  If you don’t have any money, then you can use that as an excuse for not spending.  It is a lack of resource issue.  With time, you have 24 hours every day.  There is no such thing as “I didn’t have time”.   The reality is that you didn’t choose to take the time for that task.

“I decided to take time do something other than…”

Think of it this way, if your spouse asks you to pick up some things from the grocery store on your way home from work and you arrive home empty handed, it seems easier to say “I didn’t have time to go to the store”.  The more truthful answer is “I decided to take time do something other than go to the store”.  Although that answer could have you sleeping on the couch, it is really what has happened.  Now, if the reason that you didn’t decide to take time to go to the store was that you needed to complete a report for the CEO where you work, that – if not completed – could change the trajectory of your career, you may have an easier time explaining your choice to your spouse.

How You Spend Your Time is a Choice

The point in all of this is that how you spend your time is a choice.  If you want to maximize your personal productivity, you need to adopt a mindset that it’s all about how you choose to spend a fixed resource. It’s your choice.

When I present this scenario to clients, it often results in a response such as “my boss tells me what to do and I don’t really have any choice. I have to work at least 10 hours a day to get it all done.”  What I find is that when we explore decision-making process for spending time, the client has more discretion than they think.  There is always room for improvement.  However, in some cases the client really has taken on a job that has a volume of work that is so onerous that they feel you can’t do other things that are important to them.  In a situation like this, you need to recognize that the choice to stay in that kind job is ultimately what needs to be evaluated. It’s a choice.  Sometimes our big decisions lead to feeling like we have no control over the little decisions.

Develop this Mindset to Make the Best Choices

In summary, developing the mindset of “how I spend my time is a choice” leads to the opportunity to employ a process and strategy for making the best choices possible with respect to how you spend your time.  This will enable you to manage your workload more effectively and spend more time on the things you want to spend time on.

The next blogs in this series will offer insights into how to develop a process to make the best decisions regarding how to spend your time to achieve what is most important to you.

As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, CHRL, is a facilitator and coach of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.

Life – Maintaining Balance and Managing Commitments

time managementHave you ever had one of those days where you know you worked really hard and didn’t feel like you achieved anything? It’s often referred to as spinning your wheels. This often happens because we over-commit and fail to make good choices or have difficult conversations in order to maintain balance in our schedule and in our lives.

I worked with a CEO who I really admired for his skill at managing commitments and knowing how to respond to multiple priorities and requests for his time. One particular incident stands out for me. We were in a strategic planning meeting and the CEO declared that he had to leave at 3:30 p.m. because his son was playing in the city finals of high school basketball. The executive team worked very diligently to finish the meeting on time. Unfortunately, the deadline arrived and we were not done. Read more