Easy Time Management

Slow down to speed up.

'Less haste, more speed.'

I know you are busy. I am too. I'm certain that every reader of Easy Time Management today is desperately trying to squash a dozen jobs into the time allowed for six.

Stop. Breathe. Take stock.

You can often get twice as much done if you slow down just a little. Stop spinning and start weaving.

Interestingly, slowing down can have positive benefits in all kinds of ways - a study in 1995 showed that people rate people who speak slowly as being 38% more intelligent than people who gabble.

Sometimes it is nice to hare off in every direction, but remember that the tortoise won the race in the end.

Is your life overwhelmed because other people always ask you to do things and you just can't say no?

Learn to say no before they ask.

It is much easier and it can save you a great deal of time and anxiety. The secret is to deflect and divert: When a friend is coming towards you and you suspect they want to involve you in their latest fundraiser, take charge! Before they can open the conversation, say 'I'm so glad I've seen you - I'm sure you're looking for someone to chair the cake bakers committee this year, but I've got so much on at the moment that I really wouldn't be able to do it justice. So please don't ask me, but have you thought about ...'

Or if you suspect your boss might ask you to organize the office Christmas Party, beat him to it by saying, 'You know, I really enjoyed doing the party last year, but I've got so much to do getting XYZ's reports done that I know I could devote enough time to it this year. John, who helped me last year would be a great choice.'

Only use this tactic if you really are too busy. Opting out of things just because you can't be bothered is rarely a good solution to anything in life.

If you enjoy the time management tips on this lens you'll love my new ebook, 'Total Time Control in 14 Days'.

It is jam-packed with useful and practical tips and strategies that will put you firmly in control of the time in your life so you will be free to have the time of your life.

Time Management in 14 Days

What do you do with your lunch break?

If you use the time to unwind, that is fine: time to yourself in a busy day is important. But imagine how productive those 5 hours a week could be - for yourself.

When I launched my first business, I was working for a busy advertising agency. Early starts and long days left little time to plan and develop any private enterprise. So I used the one hour a day that I could legitimately claim as my own.

I researched suppliers, designed packaging, wrote a full business plan and in less than a month had launched my own aromatherapy oil mail-order business.

I went on to use my lunch hours to develop other personal business ideas. I wrote articles, planned training courses and, ultimately, started to teach myself as much as possible about the Internet.

Now that I work for myself full-time, my lunch breaks are less clear-cut. But if I hadn't used that valuable time productively for all those years, I wouldn't be in the position I am today.

You can do the same.

To begin with, set aside your lunch hour for just a couple of days a week and devote that time entirely to developing ideas and plans for your own business.

As the weeks pass, you will be taking more and more steps toward your own personal freedom.

Are You Busy or Frantic?

Busy, busy, busy!

Does that sum up your life?

We live in a world that thrives on chaos and is nourished by haste. The little clock that ticks in our heads is constantly ringing the alarm. We are late! Better hurry! Can't wait! More speed! Aaargh!

It is all so frantic. What is it all about?

Not too many years ago, a man would happily walk ten miles to visit his love. Now he would hardly walk ten yards to the car.

Families used to sit down for meals together. Now they are lucky to meet in passing.

Isn't it time to reclaim at least a small part of your life?

There is a Zen saying: 'We shape clay into a pot, but it is the space inside that holds the water.'

Please don't misinterpret my words. A busy life can be a fulfilled life. Often the busiest people are the happiest and most successful. My focus is on creating a space between the walls of our busy lives to allow joy room to breath.

The great pianist Artur Schnabel said,'The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.'

Perhaps it is time to let go some of the things that are cluttering up your life. How many of the things that keep you so busy are really necessary to be done today? Life is full of four kinds of things:

Ones that you must do
Ones that you should do
Ones that you'd like to do
Ones that someone else could do

In our jumbled up, merry-go-round lives, these four categories get easily mixed up. We spend hours or days slaving away at things that someone else could do, when 'must do' and 'should do' stuff gets more and more urgent.

Henry David Thoreau got it right when he said, 'It is not enough to be busy; so are ants. The question is: What are we busy about?'

Try to get the tasks that dominate your life into a sensible order.

The 'musts' must be done right away. No point leaving them to become panics.

The 'shoulds' can be fitted in around the 'musts'. There are usually a lot more of these and they are likely to take up less time. Don't let them wait until they get promoted.

The 'likes' are your rewards. They are for you. Try to do something for you every day.

And if something can be done by someone else, why are you bothering with it at all? Go on, delegate.

This is more than simple time management. It is life management. Your life is so important, and you only get one shot at it, so why waste it by being frantic when a more guided busy-ness is so much more relaxing - and infinitely more rewarding.

"He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign." Victor Hugo

Do it right now.

Your success depends on those four words. But mind how you read them. It isn't as straightforward as you think.

DO it right now: One of the many definitions of that tine word 'do', is 'to accomplish'. An accomplishment is something that makes you feel better about yourself. Approach every task with the view that you will feel personal satisfaction on its completion.

Do IT right now: Singular. Don't waste time and effort trying to do two things at once. Focus.

Do it RIGHT now: You've planned, you've taken action, now make sure you are doing it to the very best of your ability. How awful it is to have to start over and know that it is because you took your eyes off the ball.

Do it right NOW: Your ahead of me. Don't procrastinate. If it is there on your list of things to be done, get it done. Tomorrow's jobs done today are sweet and satisfying. Today's jobs done tomorrow are bitter and galling.

What are you waiting for?

My kids and I had lunch in the mall today.

It was packed. The tables were crowded and the cleaners, in their blue uniforms, were busily emptying trash cans and wiping down tables.

To me though, as to almost everyone else, they were just part of the invisible background - until our lives interacted and I learned a lesson and observed another.

My nine year-old daughter suddenly dropped her extra large Pepsi - leaving a huge puddle of sticky drink and ice cubes on the floor.

Now I needed a cleaner fast - so my world instantly collided with theirs.

A guy in blue was nearby. I waved at him to come over. He avoided my eyes and turned his back - carrying on fiddling aimlessly with a plastic bag.

A voice at my elbow said, "How can I help you sir?" It belonged to a different cleaner.

I apologized profusely and showed him the mess.

"No problem," he said as he went to work mopping it all up.

"I'm really sorry to cause you extra work - you've got enough to do."

Then he said something very profound.

"It's really no problem, sir. When you take a job there are always good bits and bad bits. But if you don't try to enjoy the bad bits you probably won't be around for the good ones."

Now that is a philosophy worth pondering, isn't it!

So I started watching the guys in their blue uniforms.

My guy had his eyes everywhere. He worked flat out. I never saw him stand still for a second. It was as if the food court was his personal property. You could see the pride he took in his job just from his attitude.

The other man in blue, the one who ignored me, couldn't have been more different. He moved as slowly as possible, made every task take as long as possible, gazed into space and generally exuded an attitude which said, 'don't bother me, I'm bored.'

Two cleaners. Two attitudes.

Now, can you answer this short quiz?

1. Who had a good day?
2. For whom did time fly?
3. Who will be promoted very soon?
4. Who would succeed at anything he did?
5. What lessons can you learn from the tale of two
cleaners?

Why do you worry about things that are on your mind at the most inappropriate times?

At 2 in the morning, you can't finish a report or return a phone call.

You can't buy the batteries you've just remembered when you are standing in line in the butcher's shop.

The perfect answer to an awkward question does you no good twenty minutes after the client has gone.

Your mind is made to worry. It never forgets, it just puts things into places that it reviews every once in a while.

Unfortunately, your mind has no mind of its own. It is like a glorified pigeon-hole box. Everything is tucked away, but there is no central command to tell it precisely when to check the contents.

That's why you remember things at all the wrong times.

And that is why you worry.

This type of worry is the outward effect of your inner knowledge that you might forget something important.

As soon as you have a clear first and last step strategy, your mind can let go and move on to the next item on its list.

What do I mean by a first and last step strategy?

What is the item in your mind that is causing you the most worry (let's keep this to business for now).

Perhaps it is a report that you've been putting off, or a conference you have to organize.

Take a single sheet of paper and at the top, as a heading, define the problem by writing down the best possible outcome. What is the result that you'd most like to see. Write it is present tense and in detail.

Now, below the heading, write down the next step that you have to take to reach the outcome you have defined. This should be a small step. Maybe as small as 'write an email to Jim'.

Just one step. Beside it, write two things: the date and time you must do it, and the place. In this case you might write, Friday 26th Sept, 9.15 AM, computer/office.

Now you have to make a habit.

Fold up the paper (you'll soon have a sheaf of them) and make an appointment with yourself to read it at the same time every morning BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE.

This may be on waking, over breakfast, on the train. It doesn't matter so long as you do it every day a the same time.

In less than two weeks it will be an ingrained habit.

Now you know the first tasks you have to do today. Your list has told you.

As soon as you've completed a task from your 'Worry List', tick it, and write underneath it the very next action you have to take to achieve the objective at the top of the page.

If the next action is today, either do it now, or leave your list prominently on display. If it is not today, fold up your list and forget it for now.

By doing this, you are taking away your mind's ability to make you worry. It will know, and come to trust, that the items in its pigeon-holes won't be overlooked, so it will concentrate on more important matters.

And you might get a better night's sleep.

Here is a time management idea that I know from personal experience can save huge amounts of wasted time in business.

Meetings, when held in formal office surroundings, have a way of dragging on. However good the chair person is (if you are lucky enough to have one) or how detailed the agenda, something always seems to get added to the end that makes you sit, bored out of your brain for much longer than you'd like or need.

Well try this next time you have a meeting arranged with a small number of people: change the location to somewhere casual.

Starbucks is good, the car park is better!

Without the enforced formality of the office surroundings, people tend to stick to topic. I don't really know why, but it does work.

If you are all sat in Starbucks, for instance, finishing your coffee is a psychological trigger to get up and leave. There just isn't the urge to stay for the sake of it.

Car park meetings are even better. Nobody wants to hang around there for too long, but everyone can briefly say their piece before they all go their different ways.

I worked with an ad agency a few years ago who had two meeting rooms.

The first one was a bare room - no furniture of any kind - except for a steel bar running from floor to ceiling in the center of the room. About four feet from the ground, attached to the bar, was an 'elbow rest'. The idea being that if you needed to meet with someone you could lean on the bar and chat, but in no way was it comfortable. Meetings there rarely lasted more than 10 minutes!

Their other meeting room was a glass box, five feet to a side and about eight feet tall. Inside the box were two padded benched facing each other.

If anyone from the agency needed a meeting with an outside contractor, that was the place to do it - in full view of the whole open-plan company. Needless to say, meetings there tended to be over very quickly as well!

Any important client meetings that would not suit either little room were held in a nearby hotel bar, and presentations were held in the hotel's conference facility.

I'm not sure that such radical solutions would work for many companies outside of the advertising industry, but they worked for them and saved a huge amount of wasted time.

Effective business time management is about minimizing waste.

Try and find ways to minimize the waste of your meetings and you'll have a massive advantage.

It is often said that to be really effective at managing your time, you should strive to touch each piece of paper on your desk once only.

Receive it, deal with it and file it. That sounds good, but is rarely practical. Instead, try this. Every time you pick up a piece of paper on your desk, put a red dot in the top right hand corner with a ballpoint pen.

When you finally finish with the paper or file, count the dots and jot the number down on a chart. At the end of each week, list your scores to find that week's 'average handling times'. Make it a personal challenge to reduce your score week on week.

In no time, it will become a habit.

I've written a lot about time management. Some of it is
easy to implement and some, frankly, isn't. If we are
to accept that time is a commodity that can't be
managed, and that the only managing required is of
ourselves, then we had better look for a method that we
can follow easily.

Because everybody hates self-management!

There are lots of complicated systems around, but they
all fall down when it comes to actually using them. It
is too easy, when you are busy, to ignore the system
because just categorizing your tasks is a task in
itself!

So here is my 1-2-3 method that will make managing
yourself and your time simple.

But before we start, we have to have something to
prioritize - so get that goal list written!

Now for the easy stuff.

Write out your to-do list today with three things in
mind (and put each item in one of three columns):

#1 Does this job get me closer to achieving any of my
goals?

#2 Does this job not get me closer to achieving a goal,
but does make something on list #1 easier?

#3 Does this job have nothing to do with my goals at
all?

That's it! Now divide your time up into three portions:
70%. 20% and 10%. Give 70% of your time to list #1, 20%
to list #2 and 10% to list #3.

One final word: don't be afraid to change an item from
one list to another. Our lives are fluid and often
something that seems unimportant, suddenly changes
priority.

I hope that reading Kickstart Daily will always be on your #1 list!