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specialists in enhancement and management of human performance |
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Not Enough? Management guru Peter Drucker says "Time is the scarcest resource." Everyone has exactly 24 hours in their day. If you waste one minute, out of the 1440 you have each day. you know you'll never get it back. But the person among us is rare who operates his or her life as if it actually mattered. Most of us live our days as if we had inexhaustible "time accounts." Thrift with our money has no correlation to our management of our time. How we spend our time is mostly a matter of habit, based largely on our upbringing and social background. There are two crucial areas to time management: Structuring your time (figuring out exactly what you have to do and determining when you have to do it), and setting priorities. The chief pitfall in structuring time: making a lot of different lists on envelopes or scraps of paper. You confuse yourself, lose your lists, or both. Simple Systems Get a system large enough to contain your all your lists, calendar, etc., and small enough to conveniently carry with you. Track everything you want and have to do and your ideas, phone numbers, and other commonly needed info. Copy ten items that you intend to accomplish per day onto a daily to-do list. Many inexpensive systems are on the market, and can be modified for your needs. Some organizations offer courses to train you in time management, coupled with their proprietary organizer/book. The trap in priority setting is overkill. You can't accomplish ten MAJOR items in one day. If you overload yourself, you won't get anything done. Set limits. Group items on your daily list into three categories: urgent/important, medium-priority, and routine. Include a mix of each daily. Procrastination... ...is the fine art of keeping up with yesterday. If you like a life filled with mini-crises. It may be a problem of poor decision-making and lack of a structure for accountability. The average desk has 36 hours of procrastinated work on it. 14% of New Year's resolutions are kept by March 1st. Our culture is designed to support it. 80% of middle managers have exercise gear, but only 16% use their gear on a regular basis. Perfectionism may be at the root of you habit. You are choosing NOT to do something when you procrastinate, when you don't decide. You get sidetracked easily into doing things you didn't plan to do. You let minor things take up major portions of your time. You have something scheduled for every minute of every day. Always on the verge of being swamped by the things they have to do. No time left over to do as they like. Get bogged down in minor details that his subordinates should handle. When something is really important, you'll usually get it done on time and in good order, but in other areas of your life you tend to be lackadaisical about organizing your time. Things you would like to do get put off because you never seem to have time; non-critical work assignments keep slipping further and further down in the growing pile of paperwork on your desk; the dreams of accomplishment you once had seem to recede further and further from your reach. Focus! To improve your habits in using your time, work on these areas: concentration, setting priorities, and keeping a time diary. R. Alex Mackenzie, a well-known management consultant and author of the excellent book The Time Trap, says, "The ability to concentrate is a power that has enabled men of moderate capabilities to reach heights of attainment that have eluded the genius." Take a single task and focus on it for ten minutes. Vow that you will allow no extraneous thoughts, people, or telephone calls to intrude. Do this daily, gradually lengthening the time. Most people have trouble concentrating on a single task for much more than twenty minutes. It's hard to attain your goals if you don't know what they are. The stoic Roman philosopher Seneca was dead right when he said, "When a man does not know what harbor he is heading for, no wind is the right one." Take time to figure out what needs doing first; don't just plunge into the task nearest at hand. People will always try to interrupt you with trivia. Don't let them sidetrack you. Eat Elephants One Bite At A Time Break your day down into fifteen-minute segments and record everything you do in the course of the day. Enter your activities -- no matter how banal -- shortly after you do them. Don't wait until the end of the day to fill in your diary. If you do, you'll overlook the piddily stuff that is probably the biggest factor in your time-wasting. Follow this course for a couple of weeks and you should get a pretty clear pattern of where your time is being wasted. Repeat this procedure twice a year to make certain you haven't slipped back into old habits. Remedial Steps For Procrastination
Balancing Acts! Juggling Love, Work, Family and Recreation by Susan S. Stautberg and Marcia L. Worthing. Mastermind, Ltd., 17 E. 89th St., New York, N. Y. 10128 Test your abilities with time management: go to the quiz, "How Well Do You Manage Your Time?" in the Exercises section. (Not surprisingly, a coach can help you master time management, too! Contact Allies for more information.)
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Do something -- anything -- immediately. This will generate
a feeling of accomplishment.