Work Yourself Up!

The High Cost of Doing It All

The idea that you can “do it all” is a myth. Trying to “do it all” usually ends in doing many things poorly or few things with loss of interest. Time management was never designed as a method to get you to work beyond your endurance to exhaustion.

Many people do and call it success. Others end their work years early with heart attacks, strokes, frustration and burnout. They got more than they bargained for but they didn’t get it all.

Before any time management system can be helpful in your work, you have to admit that you can’t do it all. This system won’t expand time, it merely helps you to track, plan and evaluate time use. Get out of your mind the notion that you even need to “do it all”.  You’ll live longer if you do.

Set reasonable goals that can be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. You may want to earn a master’s in business administration in two years but you can only attend night classes and you have young children at home.

Even if the grandparents are willing to baby-sit while you are in class, how many hours a day can you go full speed? You have work hours, transportation times, class hours, homework and spending some time with your children. Before long, you are barely surviving on coffee, energy drinks and four hours sleep. That’s abusing time, not managing time.

Granted in some early career paths and with some companies, you are expected to be a slave to their every whim. If you are willing to sacrifice years of your life, miss your children’s growing up years and risk your health for a promotion that may or may not happen, then go ahead. Just remember the old saying, “time waits for no one.” You don’t get a second chance to use that time so think long about how you want to invest your time; in jobs or in people.

Yes, when you are new in a career or get a promotion, you can expect to give additional effort. You are trading irreplaceable time of your life for a job that could vanish tomorrow when the company goes bankrupt, outsources your task to less expensive labor or moves across the country with little warning.

When you develop time management strategies that help you be a dedicated, not obsessive worker then you are building skills that will be valuable to another employer too. 

You can find another workplace that gives opportunities for advancement yet recognizes that you have a right to your personal time and family time. In fact, smart companies want the well-rounded person who has a life outside the cubicle.

Don’t sell out early and use time management to chain yourself to a company that wants to use your time. Find a company that values your time and encourages you to “do enough, then do for yourself too.”

Three Ds for Time Management

When the day seems to get out of your control early and steam roll over you for hours until you leave exhausted, you are probably missing the three “D’s”. These can be difficult to begin yet liberating once you make this part of your regular daily routine.

The three “D’s” are Do, Delegate and Defer. Do you look at a request for information or new project and think, “When do I have time to do this?”  A better question is; “Do I have to be the one to do this or do I simply need to arrange to have it done?” 

The next question is; “What would happens if this were moved to a later time or scheduled farther in advance? ”  Note that these are the essential Do, Delegate and Defer questions.

DO: Which tasks are your job and which are not? Just because something is dropped on your desk or passed along to you does not mean that you have to do it. Even if your boss sends something for your to do which will totally throw off the time planned for a client project, don’t sign and cram more into the day.

Show your boss the time management plan you have for the client project and the new item and ask which is more important to be done first. Make the boss prioritize your time use.

Chances are this “do” project was something that the boss didn’t want to do and just passed it off as part of the job. That’s not actual delegating, that’s avoidance. Stay focused on what you are hired to do because that’s what you will be evaluated on at each review.

DELEGATE: Delegating is not passing off unwanted projects or less important projects. That’s what has given delegating a bad name. Proper use of delegating is to transfer responsibility or a part of a project to another worker to give that worker more experience, challenge or acceptance within the team.

It’s not a “here, you do this” type of task. When you delegate a task, explain what it is and why you have chosen this person to receive this project. If you are a supervisor, this is a golden opportunity to build up your employee by treating delegating as a show of support not a dumping option.

DEFER:  Not everything on the desk, in the email or on the phone is urgent. Be clear about what must be done today and what is not necessary. Where you get stuck is with tasks that are nice to do or useful to do but are really not necessary to do. Or they are not necessary to do at this time.

For example, notice how easy it is to be looking up something business related online then get distracted by an intriguing news story or a banner ad for a product that interests you. In moments your focus is lost and you are off doing something that’s useful but not necessary at this time on this day.

Keep an index card with three D’s in bold print as your reminder to put tasks and requests thru the test. Ask those critical questions then decide whether you need to DO, DELEGATE or DEFER.  This simple approach will compliment any time management system.

Minimizing Time Wasters

As you make the effort to use positive time management during your workday, be sure that you reclaim time that is currently slipping out of your control. Regardless how productive you try to be, there are time wasters that need to be identified and managed to really get the most from every work hour.

What’s the most frustrating time waster?  Drop-in visitors. This isn’t usually the clients - seeing them is good for business. The big time waster is drop-in visits from other people in your office.

Make an informal log of the interruptions in your day. Be honest, how many of them are necessary and how many could wait until lunch break or after work?  Even if you stay don’t hang around the break room coffee machine, people stop by to see you. There’s a fine line between friendly and sabotage.

Yes, drop-in visitors with trivial chatter are sabotaging your workday. Maybe they have less work than you do or they are simply looking for a way to avoid working. Either way, when you let them interrupt your workflow, you lose. You have to screen your drop-in visitors as carefully as you screen phone calls if you want to reclaim the time they steal from your day.

If you have a door, engage closed-door hours at least one hour in the morning and in the afternoon. To give this a positive spin, post a sign: This is my Power Hour: See you later and thanks for supporting my time management goals.

What if you don’t have a door to close at work? You can create the same sign and tape it to the entry. If that still doesn’t work, as soon as you hear the usual interrupter, grab the phone and a pen and appear as if you are concentrating on a call.

Another way to limit time wasted with drop-in visitors is to make it clear immediately that you don’t have time to chat. As soon as the visitors shows up, say emphatically, “Hello, Jane, I only have 5 minutes to spare so can you tell me what you came to say in less than 5 minutes.” 

If she says no, then you say, “Ok, then we will have to set a time to talk at lunch (break, after work). If she still insists on invading your time with “this won’t take long” (and you know it will), then be firm; “If I can’t get your agreement to limit our conversation to 5 minutes, then I don’t have time to even begin to talk now. See you later (at lunch, etc).”  Don’t worry about appearing rude. She’s rude for not respecting your time management plan. And frankly, why isn’t she doing her work?

Conscientious workers are not offended by your desire to improve your time management skills. Co-workers who have little respect for your time are also not paying attention to the time they owe the company. When you make new time management plans, be prepared to irritate people who are poor time managers. That’s fine, you are making the effort to remove time wasters from your workday and improve productivity. Never apologize for that.

Time Management Keeps You Sane

So often you hear people say, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” You won’t find that definition in the diagnostic manual for psychologists, but there’s still a lot of truth to it.

When you do the same thing over and over hoping that something better will happen, then you are fooling yourself.  For example, if you tend to oversleep in the mornings, rush out of the house, arrive at the office and spend an hour digging out the most important to-do tasks from a high paper pile, then you are doing the same ineffective things over and over. If you think that you will magically have a better start to your day without changing any time wasting behaviors, then you are definitely living in a fantasy.

Too often people balk at applying time management systems to their schedules claiming it would “be too much like a straight jacket” or “take too much time to learn to use a schedule.”

The opposite is true. Time management is the way to free yourself by knowing what you have to do and what time is open for personal or social choices. You also can tell at a glance of your calendar whether you can accept an invitation or plan to be part of a group activity.

As for taking too much time to learn, you don’t have to have a complex system. Start with a basic day planner and follow the suggestions for organization. As you use it for awhile, you can refine that system. Just make certain that you are consistent in applying your system.

If you have children then you absolutely must have a time management system to keep up with your activities and theirs. You need to know when to bring four dozen cupcakes for the class party, when it’s your turn to drive the car pool and what the dates are for the school play practices. The older children get, the more that you need to manage the time for the family so that there is time spent together as well as time attending school and after-school activities.

When you know how much time you have available, you can choose how to fill that time. If you want to go shopping, you can decide which day to go based on the amount of time available.

To find a day when you have enough time to cook a big dinner and invite friends over, look at your day planner and you’ll know in a glance. Before long you will say, ”let me check my day planner” instead of saying “yes” to an invitation only to realize later than you don’t really have time for it. That technique alone will save you from over-commitment and the frustration that goes with it.

A key reason that some people rebel against using a time management system is that it wipes out excuses. You can no longer claim that you ran out of time to complete the research for that report or help out with the children’s holiday project. After all, if you don’t have a time management system, then you can continue to use the “no time” excuse.  The problem is that you also don’t know how to plan time to do the things that you actually want to do.

So if you keep running through your day without a time management plan, you can expect to be frustrated, late, confused and get far less accomplished. Starting the next day the same way will get the same result.
If you are tired of missing appointments, never having time to do the things you want to do or feeling overwhelmed, then you need to set up a time management system. By the end of the month, you’ll have established a new habit of time management and discover the freedom of knowing how you spend the time of your life.

Time Management to Start Each Day

Waking up to a screaming alarm clock is not the same as time management.  In fact, if you are a person who sleeps until the last possible moment, throws on clothes and races out the door, you have no time to manage in the mornings. No wonder you feel that your life is out of control and you aren’t getting done everything that needs to be done. Get a better start to get a better result for your day.

Get up twenty minutes earlier. Set your clock ahead. Then set a second clock for five minutes later and place that clock across the room so you have to get out of bed to turn it off. That’s sneaky but effective!

By waking up earlier, you have time to wake up gradually, take a shower and enjoy a cup of coffee or juice. This is a kinder way to get your body and your brain oriented to the day.

You also have time to check your calendar and have a big picture of what’s happening in the day. You are also more likely to remember to bring the flash drive that you were working on last night and extra clothes to change into for tennis after work. If you don’t remember these things, you’ll waste more time going back to get them.

Here’s the ideal place to add a fifteen-minute mini-workout. Start with stretches then add a few simple exercises. You can also get a video with short workouts to follow. Or you can go outside on the patio or balcony to jump rope.

Fifteen minutes isn’t enough for a serious walk or run but you could take a few laps around the block. You don’t have to wait until you can do a long workout. Even this short workout is great for your body and stimulates your metabolism to run more efficiently for the remainder of the day.

An even better way to turn morning from dread to enjoyable is to get up earlier, even as much as an hour earlier to set the tone for your day. Spend quiet time reading spiritually uplifting material or meditate.

You might also read a favorite blog, check the online news highlights or add a daily note to your own blog. Just don’t get lost in reading emails or checking work related material because those may throw off your time.

Have coffee, tea or juice while you are getting dressed.  Then sit down for quick breakfast. Don’t grab toast and eat it as you are packing the car. You can find several fast options that offer better nutrition and take the time to eat, not inhale it.

As you are sitting down with your bagel, oatmeal, cereal or egg and cheese sandwich, look over your calendar to preview what you need to get done today. Before you insist that you don’t have time to sit down and eat breakfast, realize that you only need fifteen minutes to do this.

Even a quick breakfast is better than shoving food in your mouth while driving.  The fifteen minutes that you give your body nourishment to start the day will help you to avoid the mid-morning blood sugar drop.

That low energy time hits just as some businesses are opening and customer traffic is increasing so you will get much more accomplished at work for the investment of 15 minutes to eat a nourishing breakfast.

After just as few days, you’ll see why starting the morning earlier is the best time management option to maximize your productivity for the entire day. So set that clock back and you’ll move forward.

Time Versus Money

If asked which is the most valuable, many people will say “time.” After all, you can work hard and make more money but you can’t make more time. You have the same 24 hours in a day as everyone else. Since you can make more time, you have to be careful how you use the time given.

Time use falls into three distinct categories: work time, family time and personal time.  Your job generally dictates the minimum time that you spend at work. But work time is more than 9-5 at your desk.

It’s also the hour each way that you commute and at least half hour to get ready in the morning. This is all part of your work time. If you are an entrepreneur, then you can set your own work hours.

You may work twelve hours on a project for several days, then sleep late the next day or take a day off. In your situation, work time is more linked to output than to actual hours in an office.

However, you do need to be aware of your work time because without the boundaries of an office day, you might keep working well into the family time which creates other problems.

Family time is what you spend with your mate and/or children. This is more than just brief conversations over dinner or while rushing out the door in the morning. You need to plan time each day to focus on your family.

Maybe not the same amount of time everyday, but real time to talk and listen rather than a few words exchanged while the TV or computer is on.  In prior generations, the dinner hour was family time and other people didn’t even call during that time. Now with family schedules so varied, you have to turn off the cell phones and the land phone to avoid interruptions.

Personal time is more than family time - it’s time for yourself. Even dedicated parents or partners need time for their own interests. Perhaps you enjoy golf, tennis, bicycling, scrapbooking, woodworking, gardening or other hobbies.

If you work at a fast paced job, you might really love to have an hour in total quiet to write in your journal or to read. You might give up some of those interests in order to do things with your family, but you are wise not to give up all your personal time. This isn’t being selfish; in fact when you use your personal time, you benefit your family or mate by refreshing your interests and nurturing those talents that are uniquely yours.

The difficulty for most of us is finding the right balance between work time, family time and personal time. Work time can quickly over-run family time and annihilate personal time, particularly if you work for a company that is not family friendly.  That may be your cue to look for a job in a company that values your family time and encourages you to engage in your personal interests.

You might be surprised to find that there are major employers who feel that way. There are also many smaller companies, family owned local companies, who still believe in the importance of a balanced life style. No wonder “time” is so important that people in high powered jobs leave for lesser pay but greater flexibility because money won’t buy back time that is lost with their family and friends.

What Does Time Mean to You?

Think about time management. Is this something that you have been told you need to do or do you really want to get control over your time? You can learn many techniques for time management but you’ll never put them to good use unless you actually believe in the concept.  So how to you think of time? Is time something to spend or something to invest?

If you see time as something to spend, then you will fit well into a high structured business where the tasks are established as well as the time frames for task completion. You may want to save time instead of spend it, so you’ll find ways to cut corners at work or rush around doing personal tasks.

You are likely to say, “If I rush through this meal then I’ll have time to go to a movie.” That’s more about allocating minutes to use elsewhere than making choices about the value of the activity compared with the time necessary to do it.

On the other hand, if you prefer to invest your time, then you are more choosey about what you will do with your time.  By thinking of how to invest time instead of how to spend it, you give time use a greater long-term value.

You also think of time as the precious commodity that it is. For example, if you want to finish a college degree or start a home based business, you must decide whether to invest your evening and weekend hours in your new venture or watch another video.

It’s easy to decide to crash on the sofa after a hard day’s work. You have to be committed to your dream to get up and walk away from the television or computer game and invest a few hours each evening on your future. Time moves forward, you can’t save it to use later. That’s why you need a plan each day on where to invest your time for maximum advantage.

Perhaps you have said that you don’t have enough time to start a home-based business or go back to school. If you will take a hard look at how you use the time after work in each day and on the weekends, you can probably find at least two to three hours each day and five to eight hours on the weekend to invest in your future goals.

Initially this will seem you are giving up something when you miss the latest episode of some reality show or watch one football game instead of four games. It’s definitely a tradeoff but you are the ultimate winner as you invest time into something will take you farther in life than just sitting on the sofa.

When you need more money, you can borrow or charge it. But when you need more time, you have to work within the 24-hour limit.  Print two schedules with 24 hours or 24 lines on each page. Start with how you currently use your time.

Block out enough time to drive to and from work or any other transportation time that you need between tasks. Don’t edit, you need to see where your time really goes. After completing the actual time log, use that information to design how you would like to invest your time.

You may not be able to convert to your ideal day immediately, but by having this plan, you can begin to make the changes needed to turn your ideal day plan into your every day plan. When you think of time as an asset to invest in, then you become more likely to follow your ideal day plan and respect your time.

Managing Phone Calls

Call center workers are drilled over and over in how to get information and get off the phone as rapidly as possible.  They either make money or lose money according to the time spent on each call.

Actually, you do to, but perhaps you never saw it that way. Even though email and instant messaging are increasing popular communication methods, if you are like most workers, you will have a ringing phone.

In fact, you probably have at least two phones; desk phone and cell phone.  Unless you know how to manage phone calls, more phones just lead to more interruptions and more disruption of your time management plan.

Do you start each day vowing to keep those phone calls under control then get sidetracked without realizing how much time goes by? Here are some simple strategies to avoid wasting so much time on the phone:

1.)    When you make the call, have a purpose in mind before dialing. You aren’t just calling to see if your client likes the product. That’s too vague. You are calling to ask how the client is using the product today and is there any question for you that was not covered in the start-up guide. Then quickly move into the next stage, which may be to tell the client about a companion product or ask permission to include on a newsletter about product updates. Then get off the phone! These are the 4 most important words in telephone time management.

2.)    If the caller starts storytelling or rambling about non-business matters, politely redirect the call; “That’s great, however my boss has an important project for me so I need to go now.”  Or you can give the caller one more chance to get back on track: “Is there anything else that I need to do (look up, work on) before we wrap up this conversation?” For most people, this is sufficient hint to regain control of the call   and complete it.

3.)    For the client or coworker who wants to chat after handling business, you need to get off that call promptly. The longer you try to listen and be nice, the more you let them know that they can run over your time management schedule. “That’s all the time I have for now, I must get back to business.” “My desk is piling with work and I must get back to it now.”  Or you can bring in the third party motivator: “I have someone in my office who needs my immediate attention.”  That last one isn’t lying. You are in your office and your work needs your immediate attention!

4.)    With long winded people, offer to summarize the key points of the call in an email and get off the phone.

5.)    Set an egg timer at your phone and work toward completing most routine business calls in 3-5 minutes. The timer will help you see how much time you are wasting that isn’t necessary to do the job. Get it done then Get off the phone!

Time Management for Dinner

Back in the day all you could hear all the neighborhood moms calling the children home for dinner. Today, families are so busy; going in so many directions that it’s almost unusual for everyone to sit down for dinner together in the evening.

When the family does arrive at home, there’s often little time to get food on the table so Mom reaches in the freezer or phones for pizza delivery. You can find time for a healthy dinner in the evening by applying time management to dinner management.

Start by giving every family member a job to do in preparation for dinner. Whether Mom or Dad actually cooks dinner, the other parent can spend time with the smallest child. Older children can set the table, pour drinks then clean up the plates and load the dishwasher after dinner. Teens can take a turn preparing dinner, even choosing what they would like to cook.  If everyone pitches in, a healthy dinner can be on the table in an hour or less.

Choose quick-to-cook foods such as those shown in cookbooks for easy dinners or microwave prepared dinners. A stovetop grill is also useful for quick grilling. The idea of dinner at home is a little bit about food and a lot about spending time together.

The time you invest in talking with the children at dinnertime helps to cement the family bond. Dinner is not the time to multi-task; that means turn off all the cell phones, televisions and other distractions. Invest your time in talking with your family, not just eating in the same room.

If you plan ahead, you can cook double portions of dinner and freeze several items for a busier evening or to take to work for lunch. You might also cook a large roast or chicken that serves as the basis for several dinners in the same week.

Before putting away all the foods during cleanup, fix lunches for the next day. Package all the lunch items together in a simple recyclable paper sack or group all lunch items together so each person can quickly grab these items and pack them into a lunch box in the morning. 

One of the reasons that office workers eat so much junk food or fast food is that they don’t take time to prepare a healthy lunch.  Don’t wait until you are rushing around in the morning to make lunch, that’s when you’ll ignore it because you don’t have enough time.

A secondary advantage to finding time to prepare your own dinners is that you can save money on both lunches and dinners. You need to plan a shopping time weekly to get all the essential ingredients. If you don’t plan ahead and dash into a corner market every night, you’ll spend more money than by shopping once a week at a larger grocery store.

The time you spend preparing and eating dinner with your family or significant other, is time that you are talking and actually listening to each other.  As you are enjoying dessert or after dinner coffee, it’s the ideal time to synchronize everyone’s schedules for the next day.   

Who needs a ride? Who will be home for dinner tomorrow? Who needs help with homework tonight? What do we need to get done as a family to free time for a weekend trip? This takes possibly ten or fifteen minutes that saves so much time later by coordinating as a group.

Time Management and Energy Flow

Just as electrical equipment functions best when receiving a solid surge of electricity, so do you.  In your case, the power you need is energy, which gives you stamina for the day and the ability to kick into high gear when necessary to deal with a problem. 

It’s not that you have to be perky all day or load up on four shot espresso coffees on the way to work. But you do need to know your own energy flow. When you understand how your personal energy patterns ebb and flow, you can use that knowledge to support your time management strategy.

Are you a night person, who works late but starts slow in the mornings? Are you an early bird who can get up before dawn, exercise, arrive early at work and have your in-box cleared before your boss arrives?  Or are you a mid-day person who starts slow, picks up speed then tapers off in the late afternoon? 

These patterns relate to your natural energy flow also called biorhythms.  Some people chart these monthly and literally use them to make their schedule, work or travel commitments. You don’t have to get that involved in the process.

You can observe yourself and note which hours are your prime working hours, the times when you can be highly productive with the least effort or tiredness. Just make a simple chart of the day either on graph paper or on a spreadsheet based graph. List your waking hours on the bottom and a high, medium, low rating along the side.

Then Make an “X” for your energy level at each hour of the day. As you connect the dots, you’ll notice a pattern of energy highs and lows. Do this for several days and see how consistent the pattern is.

Knowing your prime working hours (early bird, midday, evening) is extremely helpful in how you schedule the complicated tasks in your workday.  If you have a choice in scheduling the time to make a presentation at a conference and you are a midday person, ask for a time between 11am to 3pm.

Don’t say yes to the 8am presentation time. You will wake up sluggish and not be sharp even though you know the material. The same is true for dividing tasks. With a large project, divide the elements so that you plan to work on the creative writing or material calculations during the prime energy time of your workday.

Your mind will be more alert and you will have the energy to focus on complicated work. During your off-peak energy times, gather related materials or do some aspect of the project that is less detailed and does not require a high level of creative energy or decision-making.

After using this approach for a few weeks, you’ll see what happened on those days when your time management plan seemed to derail even though you were motivated to do the work.

You simply scheduled the wrong task for your lower energy times and so your output was less than anticipated. As with electrical power, peak periods are more expensive. Peak periods in your workday are more valuable, so allocate them wisely and use that high-energy surge to get the work done faster and better.