Be more productive

Time Management Skills and Techniques

Time Management Skills and Techniques are of critical importance to people at all levels of organizations, and are often overlooked when it comes to development. Below, we look at the following aspects of Time Management Skills and Techniques:

Why Time Management Skills and Techniques usually fail.
5 Keys to Improved Time Management Skills and Techniques

Why Time Management Skills and Techniques Usually Fail

Many attempt to improve their Time Management Skills and Techniques, but it often doesn’t work. There are two key reasons for this:

Normally, people attempt to be more efficient with their time, when they should be assessing their effectiveness.
They will be more effective when they do less, as opposed to trying to cram more into their day

5 keys to Improved Time Management Skills and Techniques

Understand where your time is currently being allocated
Be aware of your time wasters
Identify priorities and set goals
Plan your activities to achieve your goals
Take initiative and overcome procrastination

Understand where your time is currently being allocated

The first key to improved Time Management Skills and Techniques is to understand where you currently stand in terms of managing your time. In order to do so, you will need to track your time for a period of two weeks. This will only be meaningful if you are honest with yourself during the tracking.

You do not need to track your time in 5 minute increments, but rather spend one or two minutes twice a day (perhaps once at mid day, and once at the end of your day), and track your activities in 30 minute increments. There are tools available on the Wily Manager website to assist in this task.

Be aware of your time wasters

A key impediment to improving Time Management Skills and Techniques are typical time waster that impact just about everyone. Here are some common culprits:

Email – much of the time spent dealing with email is not value added time.
Many meetings – make sure the meetings you attend are valuable.
Perfectionist tendencies – in some cases an 80% solution might be the best you can afford in terms of time. Perfectionists want 100% all the time, and this is not realistic.
Other people’s crises. Just because someone else is having an emergency, doesn’t mean you need panic as well.
Unclear roles or goals. If you don’t know what your key goals are, then you end up doing a lot of things nobody care about, and have little value. You cannot have good time management without understanding your goals and priorities.

Identify Priorities and set goals

A key part of effective Time Management Skills and Techniques is to make smart trade-offs with your time. It is not possible to do everything, so those that are most successful make the best trade-offs.

Focus on 3 – 7 key priorities at a time. If you have many more than this, you will be setting yourself up for failure.
Your priorities must align with those of the larger organization. If you cannot see a clear line of sight between your priorities, and those of your boss, and the organization, there is probably a good chance you are expending much effort in futility.
Ask “so what?”. If you stopped doing something, who would notice, and how long would it take?
Practice the 80/20 rule. There are times for 100% solutions, but many other times, you need to quickly get a task to 80%, and then move on. The extra amount of effort required to get the last 20% is an overwhelming burden if you have many demands on your time.

Plan activities to achieve goals

If something is truly a priority, then a key part of improved Time Management Skills and Techniques is to allocate time to achieving those key priorities. If you don’t schedule time to advance your priorities, you will be overwhelmed by things that are merely urgent.

As a caution, don’t spend more time planning the work than doing the work.
Plan Action against major goals on a weekly basis. You may not look at each priority every day, but you should not let a week go by without making some progress on important goals.
There is a Weekly Planning tool on the Wily Manager website

Take initiative and overcome procrastination

Be disciplined – sometimes you just need to get things done.
Use to do lists, but make sure they are prioritized. A to-do list is useless if it does not reflect the priority of what you’re trying to do.
Ask why you might be procrastinating. There are a variety of reasons things are put off. Some of the most common reasons are:

Fear
Perfectionist tendencies
Waiting for a deadline, because of the illusion of “working better under pressure”.
Overwhelmed – in some cases, there may in fact be too much to do.

3 Things to Remember About Improving Time Management Skills and Techniques

Time pressure is often a symptom of one or more other problems. If you can figure out what those problems might be, you can begin to address them.
You’ll be more successful when you do less rather than more.
Be disciplined.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Time Management Skills and Techniques (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Looking for the Full-Length Podcast/Video? …

Get More Done by Focusing on Your Circle of Control

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The Circle of Control, along with the Circles of Influence and Concern are a simple tool you can use to ensure you are applying your focus in the right place. Below, we specifically talk about:

Why You Need to Focus on Your Circle of Control
The Circle of Control
The Circle of Influence
The Circle of Concern

Why You Need to Focus on Your Circle of Control

Because you have more demands on your time than you have ability to fill those demands.
Many people spend far too much time and energy worrying about things they ultimately have little influence over.
Focus on key activities is the single biggest missing ingredient in most businesses.

The Circle of Control

For every activity, and every bit of energy you expend, you need to critically question whether it is in your Circle of Control, or one of the other circles.

The majority of your effort belongs in the Circle of Control, or at the very least with things that you significantly influence.
Do not overestimate or underestimate what you control. Make sure you are honestly assessing what you control and influence. If you over-estimate your control, you will become frustrated by your inability to make progress. If you underestimate your Circle of Control, you’ll end up being far less effective than you potentially can be.
Things in the Circle of Control are how you should measure your success.

The Circle of Influence

If something is not part of your Circle of Control, you can still spend time on them, as long as you significantly influence them.

These might be shared processes or simply things you provide input to.
Work to migrate some of the things in your circle of influence into your Circle of Control.

The Circle of Concern

There are many things that you may be concerned with, that you don’t actual control or influence. This is fine, as long as you realize it for what it is.

Treat the things in your Circle of Concern as a “hobby”.
You can have an interest in things that fall into the Circle of Concern, but be careful as to how much time and energy is spent here.

3 Things to Remember About Focusing on Your Circle of Control

Consider carefully what Circle specific tasks or accountabilities fall into before lending any effort to them.
Don’t under or over estimate your level of control or influence.
Those who focus most on their Circle of Control succeed.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about the Circle of Control (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Looking for the Full-Length Podcast/Video? …

Dealing With Work Overload – The Sequel

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Below we talk about how to manage Work Overload. Specifically, we talk about how you can better manage Work Overload by better planning and communicating what it is you intend to do.

Wily Manager Member Comment:

“I’m all for taking responsibility for my workload issues and accept that many of my problems are probably my own. However, how can you tell when you are actually overloaded through no fault of your own? I took up a new role two years ago and I’m still drowning, but I’ve no benchmarks to judge against other than that I coped fine in my previous role for the same organization.”

The Tough Talk About Work Overload

If you’ve been drowning for two years it’s nobody’s fault but your own.
It doesn’t matter whose fault it might be, what you need to do is focus on is how to get out of it.
It’s not healthy for you or those around you to be perpetually overwhelmed.
It’s not good for your organization in the long run for you to be perpetually overwhelmed as it can lead to turnover, lower quality, missed deadlines, etc.

The Two Step Solution to Work Overload

While people occasionally have to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going on, working excessive overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in two areas:

Planning – What are you trying to get done, and have you set realistic time frames for doing so?

Communication – Have you effectively managed the expectations of your stakeholders?

Planning as a Solution to Work Overload

Of all the projects currently under way, what’s the most valuable thing I can be working on?
Which project will have the highest direct impact on our customers? How much will the work I am doing benefit them?
How much “work effort” will each take?
Am I doing something that could be done by someone else?

Communication as a Solution to Work Overload

You need to build a plan to communicate and manage the expectations of all your stakeholders:
- Take your plan to the boss.
- Take your plan to the team.
- Talk to the customer.
- Talk to any other key stakeholders

Push Back on Demands to Manage Work Overload

Question the value of every meeting or new project.
Filter all requests through your priorities.
Make yourself inaccessible at times.
Ask for help where appropriate.
Delegate whenever possible.

Three Things to Remember About Managing Work Overload

It’s your boss’s responsibility to get as much out of you as she can.
It’s your responsibility to tell her when you’ve reached “overload”.
You have choices. Do nothing, Do something.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Dealing With Work Overload (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Looking for the Full-Length Podcast/Video? …

Busier Than a Squirrel on Speed

I once worked with a client who was perpetually behind the eight-ball – and not in the “everybody is busy” way, either. She was busier than a squirrel at harvest time on a triple-Starbucks, and a double-hit of Speed. She claimed this busy-ness extended to her personal life too, where she never had the time to do those things that were truly important.

Then she told me about her addiction to non-scripted television (I refuse to call it “reality TV” because Stargate is closer to reality than The Apprentice). As it turns out, her problem was not one of too much work, but too little discipline.

She’s not alone.

Back when I was in University, I elevated procrastination to an elegant form of art. Around the time every semester when I was supposed to be producing term papers, I would find just about any excuse not to do them. I would do the requisite scheduling of time to get them done, and lock myself in either the school library or my bedroom so something would get done.

As it turns out, I would have been better off going to the pub (where at least I would have had some fun) because those long lock-down periods produced either:

a) a thorough reading of the complete poetry works of Ezra Pound (more fun than managerial economics) when I was locked in the library

b) the cleanest bedroom ever, if I was relegated to home.

Luckily, twenty-five years later I’m starting to understand procrastination for what it is: a total and complete lack of discipline. Dr. Piers Steel recently wrote a book called The Procrastination Equation to help further understanding of this systemic problem. According to Steel, procrastination affects 95% of the population (I assume the other 5% are buddhist monks who spend upwards of 20 hours per day in meditation).

Dr. Steel spent about 10 years researching procrastination for his book. He probably could have gotten the research done in five years, if he was more disciplined, but I’m sure his room was as clean as mine was as a university student. Interestingly, he tags coffee shops as a huge enabler of procrastination. Add to this ubiquitous internet, television, video games and other people, and it’s remarkable we don’t all live in a catatonic state that Captain Christopher Pike found himself in in the original Star Trek series.

Now… I better get back to my writing – before I head over to the coffee shop.

The Bureaucratic Decoder — Unveiled

Several years ago I did some work for a large, bureaucratic utility that had only recently been privatized from being a governmental organization. In some ways, they made the transition to a private enterprise well, but many old bad habits from a public sector culture refused to die.

Perhaps most obvious to those of us from outside the culture was the quantity and poor quality of the meetings. It is not an exaggeration to say that many managers spent every day listlessly drifting from meeting to meeting, and occasionally answered an email in between. This was loosely described as “work”.

Most often, when a meeting was scheduled for 10:00, I would be the only one in the room, causing me to behave like Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman, checking my calendar to make sure I had the right time and place, and repeating the meeting request over and over to myself. I quickly discovered that I needed to run all appointments through the special Bureaucratic Decoder. Here’s the formula:

Meetings that start before 9am are entirely contingent upon traffic and weather. If either one is not cooperating, the meeting will start at 9.30 at the earliest, and perhaps won’t occur at all if conditions are adverse.
Normally scheduled meetings between 10am and 3pm will start at fifteen minutes past the scheduled time to allow people time to use the bathroom, get coffee, and arrive at the meeting. There may be some stragglers, so time was allocated to bring all people up to speed as they drifted into the meeting. For those there on time, they may have to listen to the recap four times before everyone is there, so it was generally agreed that showing up on time was a bad idea.
If anyone had a meeting scheduled prior to your scheduled meeting, they would be at least 30 minutes late, because the previous meeting would never end on time, and they need their fifteen minute “transition buffer” (see bullet above).
If you scheduled a meeting for after 3.00pm, it was considered optional. This is because all meetings started late, and ended late, and there was no guarantee that this meeting would be over by quitting time, which was the only appointment that was regularly respected in the organization.

It sounds frustrating, but the spotty attendance at meetings actually worked out well. Rarely were decisions made, and there certainly was no collaboration. The most important thing was maintaining the status quo, and any attempt at the smallest change was put down faster than rabid Rottweiler next door to a daycare.

If this sounds like your organization, then you better hope you don’t have to compete in the open market. You’ll be put out of your misery faster than the dog I mentioned above. In many cases, meetings are a necessary evil at best, and don’t do anything to move the business forward.

Governmental organizations and big utilities may be able to afford such excess… your organization probably can’t.

Conducting Effective Meetings

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How much time do you waste in meetings every week? Conducting effective meetings is a critical leadership skill that needs improvement in just about all organizations.

Conducting effective meetings is easy with a few guidelines:

Have a defined purpose and clear objectives with a written agenda
Members have prepared in advance and are engaged
Balance of discipline, flexibility, diplomacy and determination
Members have defined roles and respect established ground rules
Efficient, result focused, and ultimately save time and effort
Result in a series of tangible action items
Capture insights and enthusiasm
Motivate people to specific action
Efficient and result focused
Are documented and summarized with commitments well understood

On the other hand, not everyone is good at conducting effective meetings. Many meetings:

Lack participation
Dominating leader or member, unbalanced involvement
People don’t listen to each other
Stays off track too long
Inefficient, results unclear
Ideas and different views are criticized or squelched
Action assignments and outcomes are not clear

There are four steps you need to follow when conducting effective meetings. Here’s a brief introduction to the four steps:

Step 1 – Prepare When Conducting Effective Meetings

Ensure the purpose of the meeting is well understood. Ask what would happen if this meeting did not take place.
Prepare the agenda in advance.
Ensure that the desired outcomes of the meeting are articulated in advance.
Make sure all the participants are prepared in advance.

Step 2 – Communicate When Conducting Effective Meetings

Inform all participants well in advance of the details of the meeting; the purpose and outcomes; and, preparation required.
Circulate agenda in advance, as well as any other reading material

Step 3 – Control When Conducting Effective Meetings

Start on time
Review ground rules and assign roles
Use a “Parking Lot” to keep on the agenda

Step 4 – Document and Follow-up When Conducting Effective Meetings

Record main discussion points and decisions for future reference. This list becomes your meeting minutes.
Clarify actions and assign names and deadlines to them.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Conducting Effective Meetings (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Get the Complete ‘Conducting Effective Meetings’ Topic Bundle:

The ‘Conducting Effective Meetings’ topic bundle includes:

Effective Meetings Cheat Sheet (pdf)
Effective Meetings Booklet (pdf) containing:
- In-Depth Topic Overview
- How to Get a Meeting Back on Track
- Role Definitions for Effective Meetings
- Effective Meeting Preparation Checklist
- Worksheet for Effective Meetings
- Meeting Rating Form
- Types of Meetings and Tips for Success
- Recommended Resources – where to find out even more about Effective Meetings

Easy-print versions of the tools contained in the Effective Meetings Booklet (pdf)
Effective Meetings Video (mp3)
Effective Meetings Powerpoint Slides (pdf)

Note to Self: Take More Notes

A couple of thousand years ago, Socrates was lamenting the fact that writing things down was an intellectual crutch that was making the youth lazy. Or it might have been Plato – I really can’t remember because I failed to write it down.

It seems that as every year passes, I am able to hold less and less in my head, and rely more and more on writing things in a notebook. I have attributed this to the same reason my computer slows down after a few years – more and more bits of (mostly useless) information is taking valuable disc space away from what I need to remember most recently.

Case in point – I went to the grocery store looking for five items last week. The first four, I recalled without difficulty. The fifth item, however, completely eluded me to the point where I was wandering up and down the aisles with my mouth open, and eyes squinted hoping that item number five would magically jump off the shelf and into my basket.

I left the store with four items.

On the way home, there was a radio trivia contest asking about the actor that played the role of Skipper on Gilligan’s Island in the 70s. Any thinking person would tell you that it’s the legendary Alan Hale. Likewise, if you want to know Marsha Brady’s first boyfriend’s name (Harvey), I’m the guy you want to call.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I could take out a Craig’s List ad as the phone-a-friend guy for “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” contestants for anything that happened twenty or thirty years ago. Just don’t ask me who won the 2010 World Series. I remember watching the game, I just didn’t write down the winner.

I first started thinking about this blog post in the car, and had something really clever to say. Unfortunately, I couldn’t write it down, so you might have to check back every few days to see if I’ve remembered.

Note to self: Take more notes.

Overwhelmed? Try the 3-Martini Lunch

Back when I had a real job, I would occasionally find myself completely overwhelmed with all the things going on around me. So I did what I was supposed to do: I took a couple of minutes, and tried to find some way to dissipate the stress, and refocus that energy.

It didn’t work.

First, I got one of those foam stress balls, but I found myself squeezing it so tightly, that what I really wanted to do was to bite little pieces off, swallow them, and then crap it out and throw it at the people who stressed me out.

I next got one of those audio files of soothing sounds. Being born near the ocean, I decided to play the “Sounds of the Sea”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t relax because I kept checking to see that those seagulls I could hear, weren’t going to come along a crap on me.

I took up yoga, but failed to find anything relaxing about some other stressed out individual invading my personal space by shouting “ohmmmmm” in my ear. Rather than calm me down, it inspired in me the need to punch people.

Finally, I resorted to the old standby of stress relief — booze. Of course, in this day and age, the 3-martini lunch is frowned upon, so you need to find more discrete ways to manage stress if you choose this option. I opted to take a flask to the food court – not very discreet.

Then I realized the thing that stressed me out most, was people telling me not to be stressed out. I figured out that for the last million years or so, humans have been stressed out, and what I was experiencing was really nothing new.

Feelings of stress are good indicators that it’s time for you to take action. Stress tells the body it needs to defend itself against external stimulus. In the case of the caveman, feelings of stress helped to not be eaten by a sabre tooth tiger. In the case of the modern office worker, it to not be eaten alive by corporate bullshit.

Feelings of stress at work are the modern equivalent of the “fight or flight response”. When faced with situations or people that inspire stress, you should quickly sum up your odds of winning, and react accordingly.

We still feel the fight or flight response, but we fail to quickly sum up our odds. As a result we try to win every battle, and end up spending far too many hours at the office.

It’s either that, or figure out the 3 Martini lunch.

Overload at Work

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Overload at Work is problem that often is seen, and rarely dealt with. Many people seem to feel that Overload at Work is inevitable, and make no attempt to impact change. Below we talk about:

Symptoms of Overload at Work
The Good and Bad News About Overload at Work
Three Steps to Overcoming Overload at Work

Symptoms of Overload at Work

In some cases, people don’t recognize Overload at Work, as more of the dysfunctional behavior seems to become normal:

Continually working obscene hours. If there is a project, or some exceptional circumstances going on, then working extended hours may become necessary. When this temporary situation becomes permanent, it is a symptom of Overload at Work.
Missed deadlines. Sooner or later, the volume of work means that deadlines are consistently missed.
Paralysis. If you find yourself too overwhelmed to make a decision, or to take action, you are probably experiencing Overload at Work.
Poor mental or physical health. Stress can have very negative effects on the body. If you detect deterioration in mental or physical health, it could be a result of Overload at Work.

The Good and Bad News About Overload at Work

Often people feel powerless about Overload at Work. Here are the realities that contribute to this challenge:

Overload at Work is often self-imposed. Many people believe their stress is caused by the organization. In many cases, people put far more pressures and demands on themselves than are imposed externally.
You will need to do something differently than you are currently. This may mean giving up some things you actually enjoy doing.
YOU need to solve this. It is unlikely that anyone will rescue you from the current situation. It is contingent upon you to fix the problem.

Overcoming Overload at Work

Here are three steps to overcoming Overload at Work:

Know where your time currently goes
Ruthlessly schedule priorities first
Push back on demands

1. Know where your time goes

Before you make changes to improve your situation, you need a solid understanding of where you are now.

Audit your time for a period of two weeks. We suggest you record your time in 30 minute increments two or three times a day. This should take no more than a few minutes every day.
Do not lie to yourself. It is important not to rationalize where you spend your time, but rather simply record it as honestly as you can.
Use the data you collect to see where you can begin to make changes.

2. Ruthlessly Schedule Priorities

In order to overcome Overload at Work you need to schedule your most important priorities first – before you become overwhelmed by what is seemingly urgent.

First, you need to determine your priorities if you haven’t already done so.
Ensure that you have agreement from your boss on those priorities.
Even if it is only an hour a day, you need to get out of “fire-fighting mode”.
Block space on your calendar for specific priorities.
Beware of things you might like doing, but are not actually priorities
Remember that email is not work. Most often email is a huge time-killer that needs to be minimized.

3. Push Back on Demands

Question the value of every meeting you are invited to attend. If you do not see clear value in that meeting, then look for a way to get out of it.
Filter all requests through your priorities. Any demands you get need to be assessed against your priorities. If you boss is the one making those demands, then it can lead to robust discussion about the task, and your priorities.
Make yourself inaccessible at times. Do not hesitate to close your door for an hour or two at times to work on your priorities.
Ask for help where appropriate.
Delegate where appropriate

3 Things to Remember about Overload at Work:

Only You Can Fix This.
Know What Your Top Priorities are and get agreement on them.
You may have to give up some things you like doing.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about how to deal with Overload at Work (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Looking for the Full-Length Podcast/Video? …

Education versus Experience

Every now and then I get drawn into the age-old argument about education versus experience. On one side of the argument are people who seem to have an irrational resentment towards others’ educational credentials. They ask, “how is it that smart people can do such stupid things?”

The answer, quite simply is that education and intelligence are not necessarily correlated.

On the other side of the argument are those that wave their communications degree from the local community college around like it was a ticket to success. They ask, “I studied hard, why won’t they make me a vice-president of something?”

The answer, quite simply, is because you don’t know anything yet.

People who want to seriously argue whether education or experience is better, apparently have neither. It is an argument for brain-dead people. Here are a few points to ponder:

Education is simply a different form of experience. If this is all you have, it is limited at best.
People who have 25 years experience at something need to be questioned as to whether they have 25 years experience (like a neurosurgeon) or one year’s experience 25 times (like a barista). Sometimes anything past the first year is a waste of experience.
When things don’t happen the way you want them to, it’s not necessarily a knowledge (education) gap. If education was the only thing that mattered, then nobody would smoke, very few would be fat, and nobody would watch TV (or use any other recreational drugs).

The bottom line is that any education or development is going to make an individual better than s/he would be without it; it won’t make one individual better than another. So stop fixating over education versus experience, and go improve one or the other.

Time Management Skills and Techniques

Get More Done by Focusing on Your Circle of Control

Dealing With Work Overload – The Sequel

Busier Than a Squirrel on Speed

The Bureaucratic Decoder — Unveiled

Conducting Effective Meetings

Note to Self: Take More Notes

Overwhelmed? Try the 3-Martini Lunch

Overload at Work

Education versus Experience

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