Tip Thursday - Time Management

When everything on our To-Do list is important and we are facing too many priorities we often have to regain focus to avoid a feeling of overwhelm.

It is interesting to note that the word 'priority' was first introduced into the English language in the 1400's as a singular. It meant 'the very first thing'.  It remained singular for the next 500 years and only became pluralized in the 1900's, where we determined that we had multiple priorities.

When everything on your desk seems important and you are unable to define clearly what your true priority may be, try implementing a restricted time frame. Ask yourself... 'If I only had 2 hours left in my work day, what would need to get done?' When time is short we often are much better at cutting through to what really matters. If you're not under a time crunch (yet) then arbitrarily create one to help you establish the clarity you need.

Tip Thursday - Productivity

All productivity tips typically focus on optimizing your ability to get things done. However, this is only important if the things on your list are important. Otherwise, you are merely trying to keep busy.

Ensure that you are constantly building in activities that move you toward the fulfillment of a 'big' goal - something that moves you, inspires you, drives you, fulfills you. Without this you will likely always struggle to stay 'productive', simply because you have no interest in working on what you're working on!

The Lure of the Urgent

There is much written about how to manage your time effectively, about how to get things done.

However, regardless of how much volume you manage to work your way through each day you may still find yourself struggling at the end of the year to get your key objectives met. Your lament, of course, was that it just wasn't possible, there wasn't enough time.

When you are constantly busy, are actively putting out fires, haven't a minute to call your own... the challenge is not that you aren't moving tasks forward and getting things done, but that you might not be getting enough of the 'right' things done. This is the dance between the Urgent and the Important.

The Urgent are the loud tasks, the pushy tasks. These often seem important at the time but, in retrospect, rarely did anything to move your objectives and goals further. In fact, urgent tasks are typically driven by someone else.  These are activities that they have left to the last minute, failed to plan for, or simply overlooked.  They are now 'urgent' because they weren't dealt with sooner. Rarely are they important tasks, their apparent importance driven only by the lack of time remaining to get them done.

Certainly there is the occasional true crisis, something that couldn't have been planned for or foreseen, but the daily urgent activities you face are rarely these. Most urgent activities have only become so due to someone's lack of planning or preparation. 

In contrast though, Important tasks are those that contribute the most to our objectives and that therefore have the greatest long term impact. They are worth our attention because these are the activities that move us forward, whether personally or professionally.  The challenge though is that the Important tasks seldom need to get done today. As a result, they lose ground to the urgent demands placed upon us each day.  We then get caught up in busy work but not in meaningful work or in working on tasks that add value to the organization, our growth and our future.

Keeping busy dealing with urgent items can feel 'important' at the time, but leave us coming up short at year end. This is the biggest source of frustration for people during annual performance reviews. They feel their 'shortfall' was not due to a lack of input but a lack of time. They felt overloaded and, because they feel that they were constantly 'contributing', that they are deserving of reward - the bonus, the recognition, the promotion and are disheartened when these rewards don't arrive.  

The challenge always rests in recognising the difference between 'getting things done' and 'getting the right things done'.  One keeps you busy while the other moves you ahead.

Take a look at your To-do lists for the past week.  As you review each day highlight the tasks you had planned that directly contributed to your key objectives and goals for the year.  Odds are... you had very few, if any.  You spent the week putting out fires, moving 'work' off your desk - but not engaged in work that contributed significantly to moving ahead.  You dealt with the urgent, not the important.

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a simple system to ensure that he was being effective as well as efficient.  He did this by managing his Important and Urgent activities.  For this, take a look at your current To-Do list and Categorize each item listed according to the following...

1. Important and Urgent.  These are your true MUST do items for the day.  However, the fact that they are both important and urgent generally means that you have left these items for the last minute.  Planning ahead a little better, fitting Important items in sooner, avoiding procrastination all could help avoid creating 'urgency' where possible.
2. Important not Urgent.  Doing these items helps to decrease the number of activities you have in the category above.  Ensuring that you are not avoiding the Important for the Urgent means that you are constantly moving those important projects forward.  Every to-do list should contain a number of these items. The more your day is made up of these items the more effective and efficient you're being and likely the more successful.
3. Not Important, but Urgent.  These are the items that will tend to consume your time and prevent you from reaching your goals. The more you get caught up in these activities the 'busier' you will be but the less effective in the long run.  A common source of these types of activities are other people, especially those that haven't managed their time effectively and now have deadlines looming, creating a false sense of urgency.  Don't allow their urgency to become your own.  Do what you can, help where you can, but create a deliverable that works for you.
4. Not Important, not Urgent.  Why are you doing these?  These are activities that are simply distractions.  Minimize, eliminate, ignore or cancel.  The less of these you do the more time you will have for what really matters.

It can be challenging at first to move out of 'firefighting' mode because it can be gratifying - in the short term.  You feel necessary and needed.  It is important not to lose sight of your longer term objectives and goals.  Keeping these items constantly in mind helps you to build plans, schedule activities and take the action steps needed to move them forward.  Start by ensuring that every day contains at least one key action item that contributes substantively to a key objective.  Then make it two, then three.  Soon you will be spending more of your time on getting the right things done, which is the hallmark of successful people.  

We can all be busy.  Successful people are those that make the choices necessary to be busy doing things that count in the long term.

Top 10 Productivity Tips

If you are like me, and like just about everyone else in the work world, you struggle with trying to get the most out of each of your days.  Instead of becoming fanatical in managing your time to the minute, focus instead on increasing your productivity.  The trick is to be as productive as possible within the time available to us.

I've compiled the following list of Top 10 Tips from top CEO's, Executives, Entrepreneurs and Clients.  All are ideas that they practice and have found to be instrumental in increasing their productivity, enabling them to make the most of each day.  Some you may be doing.  Great! However, pay attention to those you aren't and determine which would bring you the most value and implement it. Don't try to do them all, start by focusing on only one value-filled idea and make it your own.  When it becomes part of your daily routine, revisit the list for another idea to try.

Here's the list, in no particular order...

1.  Pace.  Many of us lead relatively sedentary lives.  We sit during our commute, sit at our desks during the day, sit on our commute home, during dinner and in front of the tv.  Although we may fit in some workouts during the week we can boost this each day by pacing periodically throughout the day.  Pace while brushing your teeth, while waiting for your coffee to drip through, while talking on the phone, during commercial breaks.  This small addition to your day can add up to hundreds of extra miles walked by the end of the year, but serves to increase your energy and focus each day.

2.  Plan Tomorrow Before you Wrap up Today.  Knowing what you need to accomplish, before you hit the office each morning enables you to stay focused and not be pulled off track by someone else's agenda the minute you cross that workplace threshold in the morning.

3.  Assign Times to Tasks.  Most people's to-do lists are just a running list of outstanding activities, not necessarily an accurate picture of what they expect to accomplish each day.  Assigning a timeframe to each task though ensures that you are not overscheduling your day.  Let your to-do list signify what you are actually intending to accomplish that day, using a secondary list to highlight all outstanding actions that are working their way onto your to-day list at some point.  This provides a much clearer (and mor realistic) approach to creating your daily schedule, giving you a much clearer and more positive picture of what you have achieved at the end of each day.

4.  Eat Breakfast.  Yes, I know we have all heard about breakfast being the most important meal of the day, but that doesn't necessarily mean you follow it!  Just as your body needs fuel to operate efficiently, so too does your mind.  If you want to operate at your peak level of productivity you need to ensure that both your body and mind are being given the fuel they need to operate fully for you.

5.  Top 3 - First.  Don't make the mistake of coming in to the office and engaging in 'warm-up' activities like email.  If you have planned your day before you arrive you can then use your morning to clear off your big ticket items.  Most people's minds are at their peak functioning in the morning.  You haven't yet depleted your resources so it makes sense to apply them to your biggest, more challenging tasks first.  Save the afternoon for meetings and smaller, less important activities.  Additionally, if your day gets away from you and 'run out of time' then you are leaving less important activities unfinished rather than that big project with the looming deadline.

6.  Create Productivity Rituals.  The more that you ritualize your productivity actions, the more habitual and automatic they will become.  Our minds and bodies like routines.  Go to bed at a set time, wake up at a set time, plan your day before you leave the office, routinize when you check emails (not every time it pings!), when to exercise, when to eat.  Writers train themselves for set times that they write.  It is a scheduled habit that prepares their mind to write at that scheduled time.  Creating routines that train your brain when it needs to be focused (ie:  top 3 first thing in the morning) helps ensure that it is focused in that time.  Other routines simply help you to engage in activities utilizing little brain power, saving up your energy and focus for the activities that need it.

7.  Use your Waiting Time.  We all have the inevitable times where we are forced to wait upon someone else's schedule.  A client is running late, we're standing in line somewhere, airports are notorious as are doctor's offices.  Rather than simply reading email, use this time more productively by always having podcasts and articles downloaded.  These are the types of activities we should all be doing regularly to keep abreast of new developments, to learn new ideas, but rarely find the time for.  Use your Waiting Time (and Commute Time) to continue building your knowledge base.

8.  Take a Break.  I know that this seems counter-productive but it actually isn't.  Research and studies clearly show that we are not built to maintain a high level of focus and productivity indefinitely.  We tend to operate in 90 minute intervals.  Pushing through this time without taking a break is likely only going to cause you to take more time completing a task rather than less.  Taking a small break every 90 minutes has been found to increase productivity by relaxing and re-energizing the mind/body, allowing you to be more focused and targeted when you return to your tasks.

9.  Hold Meetings to Timeframes.  Most people expect a certain amount of wasted time in meetings and are therefore never disappointed.  People tend to tune out in meetings which results in a less focused and directed meeting.  Stay focused and on task, ensuring that others do as well.  Odds are you will find that most meetings are completed in under the scheduled time rather than running late. Interrupting a meeting to announce there are only 15 minutes of the meeting left and directing the group to focus on the critical issues before the meeting is over typically results in a flurry of focus and decision making.  Training yourself, and your group, to be that focused from the start will significantly reduce the time you spend in meetings and your frustration with them!

10.  Uncover your Time Vampires.  Where do you tend to lose time?  You likely have a number of activities built into your week that inadvertently cost you time, decreasing your productivity.  Paying attention to these activities and refining and streamlining them will often free up far more of your time than you realize.  For instance, watching tv.  I'm not advocating a complete boycott, but be mindful of the time you spend.  If you tune in specifically to watch a particular show and it isn't on, or is a repeat, shut off the television rather than begin surfing.  You now have freed up time for something else.  You may also find that some of your time vampires are certain people in your life, that seem to take up far more of your time than they add value.  Be strategic about limiting your availability.  A ringing phone does not always need to be answered.  When I am engaged in something that I do not want to be taken away from I turn off all of my electronic notices.  Work to your timeframe, not someone else's.

Life Priorities - Got Yours?

What are your Life Priorities?

No... not your to-do list.  I'm talking about the true gut-wrenching priorities, the 'things' that you would sacrifice all else for, that you measure your success by, that you put your energy toward, that life isn't worth living without.

Got them?  Hmmmm.

For some of us, this is a challenging question.  Sure, we have some work priorities (you know, those files piled up on the corner of our desks) and we have some financial priorities (fixing the leak in the bathtub) and we may have some family priorities (coaching our kid' soccer team) and we may have some personal priorities (didn't we just renew that gym membership?)...  but what about at least one true, overriding, it-influences-everything-else priority?

I don't think that many of my clients would be able to articulate one and, if they did, would be very success when they measured their actions and choices against it.  Paying lip-service to a priority is not the same as using it as the target against which all choices are measured.  And yet, this week, while coaching in Switzerland (I know, I know, but somebody had to do it!) I have had the privilege of meeting some people who not only are extraordinarily clear about their life priorities, they have made choices and sacrifices in support of those priorities.  Willingly.  Unfailingly.  Without complaint.

It was their joy and pleasure to work in support of that priority, even if it meant delaying their own personal gratification, because it was in clear service of that higher purpose.  A powerful lesson to me as i listened to the intensity with which they felt this, the passion that filled them, the clarity of their mission.

It struck me that, working primarily in North America as I do... that we are sorely lacking in a clear sense of our Life Priorities and what having them implies for the way in which we live our lives because, if we really believed fully in one Priority in our Life... we would live in service to it.  We would make choices in support of it and derive happiness and satisfaction from the opportunity to do so.  I don't know about you, but I don't think I remember having these kinds of discussions with my friends.  And yet... why not?

In a time in which most people seem dissatisfied with their lives, their careers, their choices, their purpose and calling, it seems that there are those for whom it is simple and clear.  In the movie City Slickers,  Jack Palance holds up a finger and remarks that life is all about 'One Thing'.  What's yours?  What's that one priority in your life that gives it meaning, purpose and shape?  What your One Thing that serves to define your choices and is your yardstick of a life well-lived?

I've experienced first hand the beauty and power of having clarity over your Life Priority.  If you lack this, spending time discovering your 'One Thing' and making choices that serve it, is likely your best key to living your best life.