Entries Tagged 'Time Management' ↓
June 23rd, 2008 — Getting results, Time Management
Got tons of stuff to do? Do not know where to start? Cannot choose one thing one over another? Juggling too many things at once?Another day’s gone and you look back scratching your head asking yourself “what have I accomplished today?”
You need to prioritize to achieve results while keeping sane lifestyle. But how do you prioritize one thing over another?
Adopt Steven Covey’s advice – Urgent/Important quadrants as he outlines it in his First Things First book. It works for me and it should work for you too.
by jayniebell
Steven Covey offers simple technique - Urgent/Important quadrants - to prioritize your activities should your care for achieving results.
Chance Brown shares absolutely coolest mindmap images of the concept.
Below is how it’s represented on Wikipedia:
Important but not Urgent
Focus here. This is the main focus area. Day-to-day work. Directly impacts your personal achievement. This quadrant includes the following areas:
Important and Urgent
Switch quickly. Identify the event as Important and Urgent. quickly switch, enter [SWAT/under fire] mode (custody of J.D. Meier). Hit the goal. Return to “Important but not Urgent” quadrant (usually recreation).
- Emergency.
- Urgent family matters.
- Lifetime opportunity.
- Disaster.
Not Important but Urgent
“Say NO until your tongue bleeds” – adopt this advice from Harvey Mackay. For more cool real world advices read his book - Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition. 
The technique seem to produce more enemies than friends, but in the long run it pays off. You are your best friend. Take care for yourself first when you need to balance your time (notice – you are in “Not Important” quadrant!).
Not Important and not Urgent
Careful. Do not mix this one with recreation in the “Important but not Urgent” quadrant. Stay away from this one! Just stay away from it.
- Trivia.
- Busywork.
- Email shuffling.
- Time wasters.
Self test
- Define your life projects. Do you know what you spend your life for? If you do – can you write down it as a simple list?
- Set goals in each. Do you know what you want to achieve? If you are – can you write down it as a simple list?
- Allocate time. Are you aware of how much time you invest in your life time projects? If you are – how much for each project?
More details in Time Management - Do You Control Your Life Or Life Controls You?
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June 20th, 2008 — Getting results, Time Management
You’ve created your life architecture and design. You have a dream to fulfill for each life project. What’s next?
Allocate time (T-i-m-e) and manage it.
by laffy4k
I use Outlook 2007 Calendar to manage my time for each life project. It holds not only work meetings but all my life activities.
After defining the life projects as Outlook 2007 categories I block time in the Calendar proactively. I monitor it through my time control dashboard based on Vista Sidebar. For each time slot I peacefully process relevant pipeline items tagged with similar category. Fast-to-done.
Step-by-step recap
Following are the steps for implementing the time management system.
What life projects can look like?
J.D.Meier’s suggests the following life projects in his Life Frame post:
- Mind
- Body
- Emotions
- Career
- Financial
- Relationships
- Adventure
Matthew Kelly suggest similar list in his The Dream Manager book:
- Physical
- Emotional
- Intellectual
- Spiritual
- Psychological
- Material
- Professional
- Financial
- Creative
- Adventure
- Legacy
- Character
What are yours? How do you manage time for each?
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June 13th, 2008 — Time Management
Are you information worker? Are you sitting in front of the computer ton of time? Do you sometimes lose the sense of time?… Then how do you control yourself to avoid this?
You need your personal time dashboard, your time cockpit.
by sekido
I am using Windows Vista Sidebar to set my time control dashboard. It is always on top thus constantly visible and showing in real time what’s going on. There are four fundamental question I need to get an answer at any give time:
- What’s the next action item?
- When do I switch gears between work and life?
- When does the pay check comes in?
- Is it time to buy or to sell?
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What’s next action item?
I am using Outlook Upcoming Appointments gadget to display what I have in my Outlook Calendar. The Outlook Calendar consists of the meetings I was invited and I also manage my personal tasks in Outlook Calendar too.
When do I switch gears between work and life?
Or in other words “What time is it?”. This is most trivial and I use Vista’s built-in Clock gadget.
When does the pay check come in?
This is a bit broader time question, but important too. I use Vista’s built-in Calendar gadget that perfectly gives me the answer.
Is it time to buy or to sell?
This question is relevant to those who are invested in stocks. I use this view to see trends in the IT market. Stock changes might indicate an interesting developments, such as this. BTW, here are few useful tips from Vered who’s in the know.
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Where are you? - Here. What time is it? - Now. What are you? - This moment. - Peaceful Warrior
What’s your time controlling method?
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February 2nd, 2008 — Getting results, Time Management
Traffic jams can be productive too. No kidding.
This post does not encourage doing distracting activites during driving but offers suggestions to utilize traffic jams times.
Working online and liberation is the ultimate goal to hit for any blogger. Until then we are bound to drive our cars and getting stuck in horrible traffic jams. Here are few practices to make traffic jams more productive then just listening to radio and hearing even more useless news.
Work
I make phone calls to key colleagues. Sync on status and action items. I am constantly get surprised how helpful it is. People tend to assume rather ask specific questions and sync. Short phone call clarify misunderstandings and makes everyone on the same page.
I make phone calls to my manager too – surprisingly he gets stuck in traffic jams just like me :). Short updates on status with key customers seem to be helpful for him. He usually focuses me on what’s more important for him.
Same with reports – short daily sync phone calls clarify the picture and help focus on what’s important.
All done from my car with 1 Km/h speed.
Family
Me and my wife have an agreement to not call each other when at work, unless it is really urgent. That is why I answer my wife’s calls even when on the most important meeting with most important customer.
On other hand it is super nice to chat with my precious. Traffic jams to the rescue! “You gotta gotta gotta try a little tenderness!!”
Or “I just call to say I love you”.
Blogging
After I made all phone calls I am still in that traffic jam… Millions of thoughts run through my mind – they are all can be cool topic for blogging. How do I write it down while driving? I can’t. My friend, J.D. Meier, uses speech recognition devices. This is what I am going to try next.
Hey, look! Just arrived to my office!
"I’m the worst person to be stuck with in a traffic jam.” - Larry King
January 10th, 2008 — Time Management
Time boxing is a simple technique of proactively allocating time for important work, personal, and social activities. It makes great excuses like “if I’d only have time…” obsolete. I adopted and adapted this technique from J.D. Meier. He explains it in his great post here - How To Use Time Boxing for Getting Results
These are examples where time boxing rocked my world
Myself. At some point in my life I realized I spend less time with my kids and wife, I spend less time for personal development like sports and reading. I did wanted to do it all but “I did not have time for that”. What a nonsense!! I have exactly the same time that everybody has – 24 hours. All I needed to make sure what I want to spend time for and how much. And so I did. I figured out what I want to do the most and I started allocating time proactively on weekly basis. I am consultant and my work achievements are measured by invested billing hours. Proactively allocating the time I know how good or bad my work performance is, should I expect troubles with my manager or find “Thank you for great job” email in my Inbox. Mixing my personal activities with work ones helps me building realistic work/life balance, prevents me from burnouts, creates anticipation for results vs. fire alarms. It removes stress completely.
Family. Time boxing helped me to get closer to my two daughters. I become true parent finally. I enjoy spending time with them and they enjoy it too. I know that – they just tell me so. I think the punch line is my wife’s recurrent “Honey, is everything OK with your work? I see you too much home”. My stretch goal is hearing complaints of this kind only.
Customers. The biggest challenge with customers I think is earning trust. Time boxing helps here a lot. Proactively blocking time for customers activities helps delivering incremental deliverables. The customers like seeing constant progress. They also like when you send an update email or make a phone call versus chasing you just to hear “ahh… ehm… I did not have time for that yet, may be next week, or month…”. There is another part – telling customer proactively “I cannot do it” up front gets you even more trust credits. I am sometimes over motivated to tell customer “Yes” just because I do not want to lose the opportunity. I regret a lot afterward since I just do not have allocated time to complete the work I’ve just committed. Time boxing approach helps me either identify available time or shuffle current time boxes to make one. Or tell the customer – “Can’t do it, sorry”.
Colleagues. Building healthy team is essential. One of the health checks one needs to make is team collaboration and sharing level. While there are plenty ways to share among the team, interpersonal communications are vital. Time boxing is of help here too. On one hand I refrain from coming to the offices – I am paid to do billable time. Being in the office does not earn my company no money, I am less beloved thus. I am beloved by my company when in the field with the customers. Frankly, this is what I love doing. What a match! On other hand I proactively block specific time boxes to come to the offices to make personal connections with my colleagues, building my network, strengthening the connections. Why? In the moment of truth I can count on them, and they can count on me. I doubt it would be the same if the only thing we know of each other was email address.
Reports. Timely reviews are essential to make sure the work is getting done, and morale is up. Progress status can be obtained via informal talks or sporadically calling reports. This is not effective and efficient. It is stressful too. When specific time is allocated in timely basis it becomes a habit to either parties. Less time spend for preparation, for meeting itself, and then for the follow-ups. My basic agenda is: “what’s good”, “what’s bad”, “action items”, “personal asks”.
Managers. Same as with reports only up the chain. If the manager has the habit of timely focused meetings – good for you, if not – train her. Show the downside of not doing timely and focused progress meetings. Downside to either party. See Reports part in this post.
Sounds easy? It is. The trick is practicing it rigorously until it becomes a habit.
Even before you finish one project, the next one is already waiting for you, because the first one creates the conditions in which the second one will emerge. So, time for family and yourself cannot be found. You have to take the time. Regard this time just as you would a religious holiday…
… Work always creates more work. It never, ever ends. You must take rest when the seventh day arrives. Period. - Ichak Adizes
…and you must stop using excuses. Start proactively allocating time – JUST DO IT!
Warhawk Matt Scott in Nike ‘No Excuses’ Commercial
