Work Yourself Up!

10 Daily Time Tips

Time management isn’t a seminar you attend or a book you read. Time management is a process that must be engaged every day to be effective. Some of the most frustrated, disorganized people in any office are the ones with the most time management books on their shelves.

It’s not that these books were ineffective. Rather in their frantic workday, these people “didn’t have time” to read the time management books! In the interest of keeping it simple, these tips could set you on the way to getting serious about time management as you see the value unfold:

1.    Get a day planner and use it faithfully. No more sticky notes with reminders and appointments scattered around your desk, car and refrigerator at home. Keep all appointments and reminder in just one place, your day planner.

2.    Create a daily “to do” list. If you do this on your computer, you can easily move around items as you prioritize the day. If on paper, you can code the items with numbers or letters for: Urgent, Need to Do Today, Can Do This Week.

3.    Read your To-Do list first thing in the morning. Don’t touch newspaper, open email or answer the phone until you see the road map for your day.

4.    Review your To-Do list at mid-day and end of day to see what was accomplished and what remains to be completed.

5.    At the end of the day, transfer the items remaining to tomorrow’s or Monday’s list. If possible, remove any items that are not significant.

6.    Delegate as much as possible to an assistant, colleague or associate. If you work independently, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant for a few hours per week. The price is right and there’s no obligation as with hiring an employee. This is particularly effective if you travel or spend much time outside the office.

7.    Attend only the meetings that are absolutely necessary to do your job. Avoid any meetings that you can. Unless a meeting is run well with an agenda, there is usually wasted time chatting.

8.    Close your door when you are focusing on a task or put up a sign on your cubicle asking people to stop by later when you are finished with this work.

9.    Let voice mail answer your phone while you are focusing on an important task.

10.    Say “no” as often as possible when you have reached your work limits. That means saying no to overtime or taking work home. When you are mentally or physically exhausted you don’t do your best work and you need to say so.

It’s easy to stay on track with time management once you commit to changing your daily habits. Just put the above tips into action and you should see more free time throughout your day.

Multi-Tasking as Time Mis-Management

The idea that multi-tasking is the answer to squeezing more work into the same eight hours is actually creating habits that cause you to mismanage time. Granted, some people can juggle a phone call and typing a report at the same time.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that if you could just do three things at once instead of two, then you would better manage your time. Actually, you create more potential for making mistakes because your attention is divide in several ways. Nothing muddles time management worse than the time necessary to correct mistakes.

Rather than depend on multi-tasking as your time use strategy, look again at some of the tried and true time management principles:

Keep an updated daily calendar. Whether you buy a sophisticated day planning system, an electronic calendar system or a small notebook, none of these systems work unless you make daily updates. If you rely of yellow sticky notes or writing on the margin of your checkbook, then you are not using your calendar to full advantage. 

Also, use only one calendar system. If you have a work calendar and a personal or family calendar, you’ll double the chances for forgetting something important. Take a few minutes to transfer all meeting notes, new items or added appointments promptly to your calendar so you don’t forget to do it later.

Divide project or jobs into smaller tasks and list each task. You can use an outline format or a tree format; just find a way to separate out each step in a process. That allows you to check off each item when done. You may also discover items that you can delegate to others. 

The project planning approach also gives you an idea of how much time each task requires so you know what time to estimate for completion of the project. This is also useful in determining what times and amounts of materials are needed for the project.

If you have to order any items, move up ordering to the top of the list so that the necessary materials are available when you get to that stage of the project. Having to wait for materials or run around time to find them is a definite time waster.

Work on one project at a time. In the construction or creative process, your attention must be on one thing at a time. Some tasks are less suitable for multitasking than others. Knowing what is needed for that developing stage also helps you choose the best time for this work.

You may prefer a block of time with fewer interruptions as you do the next phase. To get enough uninterrupted time, you may decide to work at home or at another location so minimize those drop-in visitors or ringing phones in the office.

Team projects need high level of coordination and time management. When you are working with a group, you must divide and assign each task. You also need a mutually agreed upon timetable for delivery of each segment. Working in a team can make a project go faster and easier or longer and slower, it all depends on the coordination of the project. 

Each team member needs to be accountable for his or her time so that the entire project stays on schedule. Trying to do your work and catch up on the work that another team member didn’t finish on schedule is a multitasking that rarely works and leaves frustration as well as bitterness among coworkers.

The 80/20 Factor

Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that 80% of Italy’s wealth was in the hands of 20% of the population. This may not have been a revelation to the poorer class of Italians in the late 1800’s, but it did become a concept that has been widely applied in all types of business.

The Pareto Principle basically says that 80% of the outcome is from 20% of the input. In a time management context, you can say that 80% of your time is used by 20% of your clients.

Chances are you could easily name (and recall the phone numbers) for the 10 -20 most demanding clients that you serve. Those might be your 20%. The other 80% of clients are far less demanding and create little time demands.

Of course if 80% of your income is derived from the sales or service fees of that 20%, then you are less concerned about spending the extra time. Unfortunately, you may be overwhelmed by the demands of the 20% which do not generate the majority of your income.

Using your client contact time well is extremely important to increase your business. While you might think that continuing to provide a high level of service to existing clients is the way to go, you’ll quickly run out of time and fail to generate any new clients.

That’s there Pareto’s Principle works against you. As you bring in new clients to your business, you want to transition them to the 80% that require less service demands as soon as reasonable so that you have time to add new clients.

The first step is to analyze your client contact time for several days, preferably for one week. Just keep a notepad by your desk or an open file on your computer. Log your time with each client and a brief note about the conversation.

This will cause you to be more aware of time wasted in conversations with clients. Sure you want to be friendly and ask about their family, business, etc, but keep it short. As you get to know your clients better, it’s easier to spend too much time chatting about non-business matters.

You need to find a balance between being too curt and distant v. too much talk about trivial things.  If you reduced each of these conversations by 10 minutes, you could reclaim another hour easily, maybe more.

The second step is to structure your day for client contact. Even if your job is to be on the phone all day, make the effort to group your calls. Plan to make new client calls in the morning when you are fresh and enthusiastic. Set aside the afternoon for current client follow-up calls.

If you have any problem client calls to make, group those in a one hour block and get it over with at one time period. Decide in advance how much time you want to spend on each type of call, and then time yourself. As you get accustom to the flow of each type of call, you will begin to stay within the scheduled time naturally.

Finally, if 80% of your revenue or income consistently comes from 20% of your clients, consider hiring an assistant to work on some of the less important details in serving the other 80% of your clients.

That frees your time to spend with the 20% of clients who are supporting most of your lifestyle.  If you can make more money by working with fewer, qualified clients, then your time spent with them, no matter what you chat about, is time well spent.

The 3 Ps of Time Management

Albert Einstein cleverly explained that “the only reason for time is so that things don’t happen all at once.”  You may be thinking, “Clearly he didn’t know how things go at my office.”

Actually, Einstein’s genius for creating universal theories does work in that comment as well. While you may think that by multi-tasking you can extend your time, what often happens is that you make careless errors and forget important tasks. The brain can only manage so much, no matter how many minutes pass on the clock. You can use time, plan time and manage time but you can’t stretch time.

That’s why you need to deal with the 3 P’s: procrastination, planning, prioritizing.
You might think it odd to begin with procrastination, what can that have to do with time management.

Actually, nothing destroys time management faster than procrastination. The typical procrastinator isn’t lazy, that’s a common misconception. Many highly intelligent and capable people procrastinate because they want to get everything just right.

If you wait until all things are perfectly aligned, then you may wait a long time. File that pile on your desk, sure you’ll do it when you have time to color code the files. Set up the client email list, yes, you’ll do it when you learn the newest software. That’s the sound of procrastination. When these simple tasks are not done, it’s the foundation for a train wreck of work left incomplete.

Taking time to plan helps overcome procrastination. Instead of the need to do all the work at once, create a plan that tackles those delayed jobs in thirty-minute intervals each day.

Then set up a plan to avoid starting the same problems over again. Not every task needs to be done every day. Set up lists of daily, weekly and monthly work tasks with an assigned day to do the weekly or monthly tasks.

Having a work plan is a sense of security that methods are in place to complete the necessary tasks. With each complete task, the sense of accomplishment pushes procrastination farther away.

Learning to prioritize time use is vital to get the most important tasks done even if everything does not get finished. Unless you have a small “to do” list, don’t expect all the items to be crossed off each day. 

The best-structured work plan can be changed when new situations arise. If you don’t have practice in prioritizing regular work tasks, then you will be unable to make the fast break necessary to change the priority of today’s schedule when something more lucrative or imperative happens. 

In simple terms, you prioritize anytime you decide that one task is now more important to do than the other one. Of course you have to set up some basics for making this choice. What is the priority in your business?

If you are a firefighter, then dropping everything and racing to the emergency is the priority. If you are a real estate agent, you may have to give up a Saturday afternoon out with friends when a good prospect wants to see a house.

Whatever type of work you do, you know which tasks are the genuine priorities and which can be done at another time. Be careful not to make everything a priority because then nothing is the priority and your time use is so crowded that nothing gets done well.

Einstein was right, don’t try to make everything happen at once. You’ll get frustrated, make mistakes and start to feel that time is your enemy when as the Pogo cartoon character told us, “We have met the enemy and it is us!”

Managing Your Vacation Travel Time

Perhaps you think that the last thing you want to consider on vacation is time management. After all, you can sleep later and choose your activities. While that’s true, there are still ways that positive time management can help you to pack the most enjoyment into your vacation travel.

Air travel gets you to your destination faster and fresher, but only if you consider travel times. Avoid flying during the morning business travel times. Airplanes are crowded and you’ll spend an hour just getting thru security check at many major airports.

Better to take a mid morning or afternoon flight and sleep an extra hour or go out for brunch on the way to the airport. If you are traveling to a major city, check online for the status of your flight. You can activate a flight time alert sent to your cell phone or computer so you know instantly if your flight is delayed.

If you prefer to drive and explore small towns on the way, your trip will include long periods in the car. Traveling with children means that you need to prepare plenty of in-car activities so that you can avoid the whiners, “Are we there yet?”  Allow extra time for several rest stop breaks so the children and run and play. Spending twenty minutes at each rest stop is worth more than making that extra hundred miles.

Whether you drive to your vacation destination or fly and then rent a car to get around town, bring city maps of your destination. Getting lost wastes time. Using your computer you can map routes to your hotel and nearby tourist attractions. The computer maps also give an estimated time between locations.
When you arrive at your hotel, ask the desk clerk to tell you the prime traffic times in that area. Explain where you plan to drive to and ask for suggestions on the best time to leave. Locals know the traffic flow and can suggest that you wait fifteen minutes to avoid the worst traffic jams in a certain area.

You also want to ask where to find the best gas prices. If you rented a car, make sure to note the location of a gas station nearest the airport so you can fill up on the way back.  Typically gas prices go up on Friday for the weekend.

In a tourist town, gas prices may be higher than what you would pay a few miles away from the main hotel row. Don’t waste time driving around town to save a few cents, just plan ahead and get gas on the way back to the hotel in the evening.

Rather than eat at the hyped tourist oriented restaurants, ask where locals eat. You’ll find the most interesting, out of the way places that reflect the local character. Plus you usually find fantastic food at popular prices.  You can also ask about restaurants that offer lower priced menu at the early bird dining hours, 4:30-6pm.  So go to dinner early, save money and then plan an activity for the evening.

As you decide which theme parks or attractions to visit, you would be smart not to go to more than one per day. Exhausting your family or getting group sunburn will ruin the rest of the trip. Enjoy what you do, and build in time to relax. After all, it’s your vacation.

If Only You Had More Time

Be honest, how many times have you said that? Do you say it weekly, daily or several times a day? That’s a red flag indicating that you are either not using any time management strategies or the ones you are using are not working for you.

Either way, time is ticking away and you are running to catch up. At some point, you just can’t run any faster, work any longer or stay up any later. You have to get control of how you use your time each day.

You may insist that you don’t waste time but take a serious look at how you use your time. Do you stretch your lunch an extra half hour or stop and talk to co-workers several times a day on the way to the copy machine?

Add it all up and there’s a potential hour or more of wasted time. What about personal phone calls or personal emails? There goes another half hour. Do you “take a few minutes” to surf the net on work time? Chalk up another half hour to hour or more. 

You may be present at work, but you are not using work time efficiently. You are wasting anywhere from half hour to three hours of work time. Not only is that cheating your employer, but it’s putting you behind in your work. So you take work home and get angry about it.

Then you look at the co-worker sitting across from you. She’s taking online university classes gradually working toward her graduate degree. Plus she plays tennis twice weekly for exercise and volunteers one weekend a month with Habitat for Humanity. 

She leaves work on time most every day and her in-box is clear. She does it by consistently applying time management strategies. Yet she never appears rushed and you never hear her complain about not having enough time.

Chances are that your active, productive co-worker prefers to live life aligned to her goals rather than reacting to others. When you fail to make a plan for time use, then you’ll let other people fill our time.
“Hey, can you take me to the mall?” “Come on over and watch my new video.” “I’ll pick you up and we’ll just hang out for the day. You can do your work later, you have plenty of time.” 

Those are the ways that you allow other people to use your time because you have failed to plan your time. If you ask your co-worker to hang out after work, she is more likely to say, “I have a paper to write for my class, so let’s pick another evening that works for both of us.”  She isn’t ignoring you, but she isn’t willing to let your lack of planning change what she needs to do according to her time management plan.

If you are still saying, “I wish I had more time” at home, then look around for ways that you waste time. Do you spend half hour in the morning searching for a particular shirt, finding it in the dirty clothes basket then looking for something else to wear?

You need to plan your outfit the night before and put out all the pieces from shoes to shirt so you can dress quickly.  Place everything you need in one place near the door you exit each morning. You can also place your briefcase in your car the night before so you have less to think about in before leaving for work.

Once you know how long it takes you for morning basics, then you take the frantic feel out of mornings. Next you can start to streamline your work hours. Work productively at work and save the personal items for your own time.

When you get your job done within the eight hours, then you have the evening for yourself and don’t need to stay late at the office. Who knows - you might decide to join your colleagues’ tennis group.

Knowing How to Schedule Your Time

No matter how many time management books you read, one of the most difficult parts is knowing how to make your own schedule. In some workplaces, the time is structured for you. In others, you have more freedom to set your schedule. Either way, you make decisions about how you do what you do and the efficiency of your effort.

Basically, creating a schedule requires that you take a realistic look at the time available and know the tasks that need to be done in that time.  You have to allow enough time in your schedule to transition between tasks.

That may mean driving to a different location and dealing with traffic delays. For other tasks, you may have to gather additional research, calculate a budget or meet with a colleague. When you fail to build enough time into your schedule for transitions, then you’re likely to get behind and stay that way.

Another problem in many schedules is over-committing. You only have so many work hours available. Considering the time needed for transitions plus unexpected interruptions with real or perceived urgency, you can’t work too many critical projects back to back without over-commitment. When that happens, something is missed or everything is done half-way. That’s not good time management, that’s a train wreck happening right at your desk.

Remember to schedule time for yourself. You need a lunch break and a few minutes mid-morning and mid-afternoon to take a break. If possible, take a way outdoors or get away from your desk so refresh your mind as well as grab a coffee.  You also need to include meetings and community activities related to work.

If you are a manager, then your schedule must include time to coach and motivate your employees or team members. The much applauded “open door policy” can be an invitation to distractions as many visits to your office are more casual than business related. Your schedule may need a period each day for “closed door” work time. 

Unless you required to constantly monitor email, then you can schedule email checking two or three times during the work day, not every five minutes.  You can also sort email into folders and schedule time for different types of email; orders, client contact, questions, employee contact, personal, other.

You may have a habit that’s common in offices to check email as soon as the envelope notice pops up on your screen. That’s letting a distraction into your workspace. Turn off the automatic notice and schedule the times during the day when you will check email.

Taking charge of your schedule is the first step to effective time management. Your schedule is the framework that tells you where you want to use your time and by reviewing the schedule, you can see if your plan was effective.

Time and the Tube

Time in front of the television seems to escape faster than anyone realizes. Of course there’s nothing wrong with taking a break after dinner and watching a favorite television show.

And certainly sports fans are glued to the tube on weekends. Even if you don’t care a lot about sports, you were probably among millions who tune in to incredible sporting events like the Olympics or the Super Bowl. Even those are limited time programs. It’s the regular shows that tend to take up the most time.

Be honest with yourself, how much time do you spend each day watching TV? Maybe you don’t count the time that the TV is on and you are listening to it while doing other things around the house. But you still stop and dash back into the room when you hear something that you want to see.

If you still protest that you don’t watch much TV, how many shows can you name the lead characters? What about the supporting characters? How often do you talk with you co-workers or friends about what happened in the last episode of certain reality shows?

Are you able to name all the contestants from the last five seasons of a show? Do you know more about the personal history of TV characters than you do about your neighbors? Do you freak out when the cable is down? Have you ever refused an invitation because you absolutely had to see a season finale as it happened? These are signs that you are more chained to your TV than you realized.

Stop living your life through TV characters. A.C. Nielsen Company survey shows that the average person in America watches more than four hours of television every day. That’s 28 hours in a week and if you are like most TV watchers, you watch more hours on Saturday and Sunday than on workdays.

With some cell phones, you can get television programs so you could even take it with you everywhere. And if you can’t give up your favorite series during the summer hiatus and you are compelled to watch the past season reruns of DVD, then you are giving too much importance to television in your daily time use.

Think about a favorite TV show or character. What is so compelling about them? Do you admire the career of the main character? What would it take for you to have that career? Perhaps you need to get a college degree or additional technical training.

Maybe you have to move to a different city where you can break into that career. Rather than long for the life of the character, start doing what’s needed to get that life for you. You’ll have to give up some TV time and invest that time into preparing for a new career. With time management that’s geared toward your goal, you won’t wait for a weekly visit to the lifestyle you want. You’ll be in position to have that life for yourself every day.

It’s not that you have to give up television totally to have other pursuits in your life. But you will need to be choosy about what you watch and the time you are giving to TV. If you can’t cold turkey turn off the set every day, then limit yourself to one hour nightly.

In that hour, you can watch two thirty-minute shows or one hour long show. Decide to turn off the tube and start new projects to expand your life. Become the star of your own life. It’s your time, so you might as well use it for your benefit.

Time Is a Four-Letter Word

Granted this states the obvious but it does capture the feeling about time. It’s not that you don’t like having time to get things done or time to spare. That’s not the problem. The reason that “time” evokes such strong feelings is when your calendar is so crowded that time feels more like a curse than a benefit.

The way to take away the frustration over time is to better use the hours that you have. Everyone works with the same 24 hours but some people seem to get more out of it. They certainly aren’t expanding time, that’s not possible. What they do is to use time efficiently and that’s the essence of time management.

The most challenging aspect of time management is to decide that you really do want to manage your time. If you are certain about that, then you have to decide if you are willing to make changes in your schedule and activities. 

There is no cosmic shoehorn that allows you to cram 35 hours of work into a 24-hour day. When you hear that someone wants to “make more time,” forget it. There is no way to expand the hours. You simply need to make choices about how to use the hours in each day.

When you think of ways to do more in the same time period, don’t even think about cutting back on sleep. That’s a common mistake.  You need seven to eight hours of sleep nightly for health, energy and to work at prime efficiency.

Working late and cutting back to five or six hours might be ok once in a week, but it’s not good to do all week then think you can catch up on the weekend. A sleep-deprived body and exhausted brain are not your best assets. You’ll get much more accomplished by getting a full night’s sleep and tackling that new client proposal or special project in the morning.

If you have more work, family and leisure activities than you can fit into a reasonable day, then you need to make some choices. Before you start to associate time management with giving up something, understand that this is not the point. You can’t manage your time until you decide what goes and what stays.

Even then it’s not about giving up something. You can alternate some activities. For example, if you like to play golf but rush through the course to take the children fishing, then play golf two weekends and set up an all day fishing adventure on the other two weekends. This way you can enjoy both leisure pursuits without being so frantic that the fun is taken out of having fun.

Time management isn’t just about finding more ways to cram in more work. Effective time management also helps you find time for leisure or even to sit around and do nothing. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Imagine if you had time to lounge by the pool, read a novel instead of a company report or ride your bike around the park.

That’s not a fantasy or something that you put off until retirement. Having time for yourself is possible, if you are willing to apply time management techniques to your busy life.

Just get out the eraser because you have to start by trimming back to a manageable amount of activity to fit into a 10-12 hour day with 8 hours to sleep. That leaves 4 to 6 hours to spend each day. If you take away worry time and zoning out in front of the television, you have just found time. Now it’s up to you to manage that time.

Get Stuff Done...with a Pencil

One of my favorite time management techniques is working from a list. Personally, I like to do things with a pen and paper. I find it really helps to have a "hard copy" of my tasks for the day and physically marking through everything I do with a pen.

Just found a great resource for those of you who are looking to get more out of your "to do" list as well as organize projects in a more systematic way.

Also included...

• 5 awesome ideas to be more productive with paper. Includes the Todoodlist, a deliciously low-tech fun approach to keeping a to-do list.
  
• A simple 5-step system to reduce complexity in your life that you can put into practice today and get results straight away.
  
• A no-nonsense, indispensable blueprint for starting new projects to help you launch faster, hit your targets and achieve your dreams.

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