Resources/Ten Quick Tips to Better Time Management
Kouzes and Posner, authors of The Leadership Challenge, estimate that a leader has only nine minutes of time in-between interruptions. This being the case, if you don’t structure your time well in advance each day you’ll find yourself working off someone else’s inbox while you grow more frustrated that your own work piles up before you. Effective leaders don’t allow their busy days and vast responsibilities to overwhelm them. Rather, they become masters of their own time and schedules through disciplined and conscientious effort.
The following are ten tips and insights that will help you leverage your time for optimal results:
- Understand that you are surrounded by other people’s agendas each day: your boss’s; your employee’s; your family’s; your customer’s; your vendor’s and your friend’s. Thus, if you don’t fill your calendar with your own priorities, the time you have chosen not to manage will come under the influence of those around you.
- Say “no” often. Realise that your daily schedule reveals two things: those things you’ve decided to do and those things you’ve decided not to do. Every decision to do one thing is at the same time a choice not to do a dozen other things: to say “no”. Healthy leaders, politely and regularly, say no to many of the opportunities presented to them. They know that opportunity doesn’t equal obligation. In fact, the best leaders say no much more often than they say yes. They do so tactfully: saying no to the opportunity and not to the person and even offering an alternative course for the person where possible.
- Always “sleep on it” before committing to a new obligation. Don’t get caught up in the emotion of a moment and cavalierly take on new responsibilities without thinking it through. Don’t let your mouth overload your back. What is on your schedule right now that you should have declined or turned down? Learn from it and don’t be so impulsive next time to make someone else’s life easier by saying yes while you further burden yourself.
- Develop disciplined, effective routines. Some leaders categorise “routines” as dull and unpleasant and go to great extremes not to get locked into them. Yet, the most effective leaders use well-thought out routines to make sure priorities aren’t getting overlooked. Peter Ducker said “routine makes unskilled people without judgement capable of doing what it took near genius to do before”. If routine does this for unskilled people, imagine what it can do for you.
- Remember that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Relentlessly delegate, automate and outsource administrative tasks. Stop doing the wrong things well and often.
- When an unexpected visitor stops by your office to chat, stand up and remain standing. If you stand they are not likely to sit down and thus more likely to state their business and leave quickly.
- Rip and read. Take the trade journals and magazines you get and go through them once, ripping out the stories you’re interested in and throwing away the rest. Place these articles in a file and carry them in your briefcase to read while you’re waiting for appointments, in airports and so forth. Not only will this make it easier for you to keep fresh on current events in your down times, it will reduce the clutter in your office.
- Block off more time, preferably in the morning, where you do not take calls or look at the computer. In this hour or two, execute your priorities. As you attack the “main thing” early in the day, you can remain more effective throughout the day regardless of how harried things become.
- Finish your day before you start it and evaluate and adjust at the day’s end. Review the “game film” of each day through your mind for five minutes before you go home and make adjustments on your calendar to make the next day more effective. By planning your days and weeks in advance you walk in each morning with more focus, confidence and resolve.
- When at home, give your family focused attention. The good news is that as you follow the tips suggested here you’ll be more effective at work and will be more likely to have a life away from the work place. Don’t answer the phone during meal times. If the people in your charge can’t handle things in the time it takes you to converse and eat with you family, then get yourself some real help.
The ten tips presented here don’t take genius but they do take discipline, resolve and mental toughness. They will require that you add more structure to your day – and to your life. In today’s undisciplined, make-it-up-as-you-go times, structure is missing in many lives and in organisations. Structure is a good and necessary discipline. Without structure, you’ll never develop to your fullest potential.