2 | Make a priority “to do” list each evening for the following day. You’ll sleep better, wake up with more enthusiasm, and be a better steward of your time all day long.
3 | Wake up early, before the time when your obligations and responsibilities kick in. Organize your bed time and wake-up time so that you have at least fifteen to thirty minutes to yourself before you have to get dressed, deal with the kids, or leave for work. A morning buffer time puts you, not frenetic circumstances, in charge of your day.
4 | Return as many of your phone calls and e-mails as possible at one or two predetermined times during the day. This will save most people from twenty to thirty minutes a day that would ordinarily be wasted. We’ll discuss this from a business standpoint a little later in the chapter.
5 | Batch or group as many of your daily or weekly errands as possible so that time is not lost by simple inefficiency.
6 | Think of your relationships as precious investments. I’ve observed in my coaching experience that nothing can compete with the regret caused by looking back and realizing, “I’ve spent way too much time with the wrong people.” In light of God’s purpose for your life, are you investing enough time with the right relationships?
7 | Avoid the quick-fix mind-set at all costs! Instead, do it right the first time. If you don’t have time to do it in excellent fashion the first time, when will you have time to do it over? Taking shortcuts saves time today, but it costs even more time in the future.
8 | Thoughtfully prune something in your life each year, or maybe even every quarter. Abandon as quickly and politely as possible those obligations, projects, habits, and commitments that you’ve come to realize no longer serve your God-given purpose. Big or small, what could you let go of today and never even miss?
9 | Insulate yourself sufficiently from distractions. You will be far more effective as a mom, dad, husband, wife, or business partner if you routinely have some space or margin where you can quietly think and proactively take care of yourself without being interrupted by others. Then, schedule time daily or weekly to deal with the important people, projects, and priorities in your life.
10 | Constantly remind yourself that time equals life! View each hour of the day as a gift. Stay aware of your time like a world-class athlete watches his or her diet. Quickly evaluate each day in less than two minutes by asking, “What went well today? What didn’t go very well? What will I do differently tomorrow?”
Remember, your ability to manage your time affects your marriage, your parenting, your fitness, and your potential for influence in the marketplace.
Vital Time Tactics
The following ten tactics will help you manage your work responsibilities more efficiently. As a result, you will be able to enjoy more Vital Time. In fact, the aim of this entire chapter is to help you create more Vital Time, at work and especially at home. In my life, for example, I am continuously striving to increase the time I invest with my top clients, the time I invest creating and delivering content, and the time I invest thinking strategically about my coaching practice. At home, my Vital Time includes quiet time each morning, physical exercise, uninterrupted time with my wife, and quantity time with my three sons. What about you? What do you consider your Vital Time?
Vital Time Tactic #1: Overcome Procrastination
You must win the battle against procrastination to rise above the average and create Vital Time. If beating procrastination were not one of your objectives, you probably would not be reading this book. Peak performance and procrastination are simply incompatible. It is certainly accurate that “tomorrow” can only be found in the calendar of fools.
Seven Ways to Procrastinate Effectively
A Parody
1. Just wish, hope, and dream. There’s really no need to set clear, specific goals and then roll up your sleeves and get to work.
2. Always work on what’s fun and easy—C and B tasks—rather than doing A priorities—the things that are often hard but necessary. Don’t low-priority tasks build momentum?
3. Stay in your career even if you find yourself unhappy, stuck, and unable to grow. You can always look forward to the evenings and weekends.
4. Always delay difficult work if you’re tired! Use fatigue strategically to escape those uncomfortable tasks.
5. If you fear something is wrong with you physically, don’t see a doctor. That way you can avoid dealing with the reality of a possible illness. It’s much easier to wait until you’re really sick.
6. Tomorrow is always a good day to start something important, such as exercising or dieting. Next week is even better.
7. Take a break from all projects when you hit the 90 percent completion mark. That way you’ll alwyas have them to come back to.
Procrastination, which means delaying higher-priority tasks in favor of lower-priority ones, is responsible for more frustration, stress, and underachievement than any other single factor. It is the art of keeping up with yesterday and avoiding today. Procrastination causes emotional anguish, devastates personal relationships, wrecks any attempt at effectiveness, and promotes physical and mental exhaustion. Procrastination is all about excuses, and you know as well as I do that the excuses you have today are the excuses you will have tomorrow. Today’s excuses are but the ancestors to tomorrow’s excuses and the predecessors to future mediocrity.
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Rapid-Fire Time-Saver #7
Schedule your most difficult tasks during your most productive time of the day.
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So how can you defeat procrastination and start creating Vital Time? Most often the hardest part of getting started is getting started. Once you’re involved, you’ve overcome the highest hurdle. And you don’t always have to start at the beginning. If the first step seems hard or too large, start with another part of the project. Or set a minigoal, such as working at something for fifteen minutes, whether it’s reading, exercising, or a work project. Often after fifteen minutes you’ll want to continue. You may even complete the entire task. I used a kitchen timer, set for fifteen minutes, to get me in the habit of daily reading. I usually ended up reading much longer, and that habit is now ingrained as a part of my daily routine. Break large jobs down into small pieces or daily doables. As the saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? Piece by piece, one bite at a time.”
Develop a sense of urgency, a “do it now” attitude, a bias for action. And use a fast tempo. The faster you are, the more productive you’ll be. Believe it or not, you’ll get less fatigued walking fast, doing things fast, and getting out and moving than you will if you’re trudging around.
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Rapid-Fire Time-Saver #8
If you make an appointment well in advance, call the day before to confirm, asking for a response only if plans have changed. This is professional, and it saves time and embarrassment.
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Learn to make decisions quickly as well. Successful people take little time to make a decision and a long time to change a decision once it has been made. Good decision making involves anticipating what the options are and assessing the pluses and minuses of each one. Develop a system that you use consistently when making decisions. Get input from good decision makers and learn from them. And remember, it’s better to make a bad decision than to make no decision at all. Making no decision produces stagnation and triggers feelings of failure, confusion, and worry. It’s been said that even the best plans fall flat if you’re consumed by indecision and make no move to put a plan into action. Be a doer, not a wisher or a hoper.
If your life is to get better, you have to do something constructive to make it better. There’s nothing more constructive than eliminating procrastination from your life.
Seven Valid Reasons to Procrastinate
A Parody
1. Most obviously, putting things off allows you to escape from unpleasant activities. These could be things
that you’re afraid to do or simply things that you don’t enjoy doing.
2. If you wait for things to get better, you can still blame the world for your unhappiness. Enough of that personal responsibility stuff.
3. You can subtly manipulate others to do the job. If you put it off long enough, somebody else eventually may have to step in and do it for you.
4. You can avoid the increased responsibility that goes with success. If you do a job well and on time, others will only expect you to do it again. This, of course, is grossly unfair.
5. If you don’t feel like doing the job now, you can plan to do it later. Some call this laziness, but they’re rude.
6. You can claim perfectionist immunity. Because you’re so conscientious, others will understand if you never get started.
7. If you’re not sure, wait. This is a good rule of thumb. A difficult, overwhelming, or insurmountable task should always be delayed until you’re absolutely ready and well rested.
Vital Time Tactic #2: Organize Your Work Space
You must have a strategically organized work space. You can practice all the other time-management principles, but if you remain disorganized, you’re going to severely restrict the effectiveness of the other principles you practice. Most disorganization comes from indecision—for example, not being able to decide if a piece of paper or some other information is important, and if it is, what to do with it. This is manifested in the habit of picking up the same things three or four times, having a constantly overstuffed in-box, and having multiple stacks of papers, periodicals, and files lying around the office. If your office is typical, roughly three-quarters of the items in your files should be deleted or placed in the trash.
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Sucessful people have successful habits. Mediocre people have mediocre habits. And it all starts with a choice.
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On and around your work space, divide all objects into one of two categories: tools or supplies. Tools are reusable items like the stapler, telephone, tape holder, scissors, and letter openers. Supplies are consumable items such as staples, tape, correction fluid, paper clips, Post-it notes, and letterheads. Keep tools and supplies in a separate storage area, such as a drawer, on a shelf, or in cabinets.
Use an in-box and out-box. Check the boxes at least twice daily at specific, predetermined times. Appropriately file or act upon all incoming materials immediately. To maximize your effectiveness and productivity, avoid handling any item more than once. Another idea is to stand up as you sort your in-box; you’ll move faster and save even more time.
Every time something comes to your desk or your e-mail in-box, ask, “Is it an action?” In other words, is it a to-do item? Is there some specific action you must take, or is it a support, a reference, or some sort of information that you may need to access sometime later? If it’s something you may need to access later, put it in the appropriate file category and then alphabetize the information in that file. If it’s an action or to-do, place it in one of three action categories:
• The routine to-do files if it’s a recurring, routine task such as “to read,” “write letters,” or “call back”
• The priority to-do files if it’s a task that must be prioritized
• The tickler to-do files if the task needs to be completed on a specific future date
I handle my incoming e-mail similarly to the way I handle physical items. I usually check my e-mail at designated times, typically second thing in the morning, before lunch, and before I leave the office in the early evening. I skim the new messages, quickly replying to any that I can handle in one hundred seconds or less and moving the rest to one of three subfolders. If I need to draft a significant reply or do something in response to the e-mail, I move it to the Action folder. If I need to review something, I move it to the Read/Review folder. If I need to wait on a response from someone else, I move the message to the Pending folder. I also move e-mails I have sent to the Pending folder if I must await a reply from someone. By default, all other e-mails are either deleted or saved by my assistant to our reference or research folders on our company server. Many of my 1% Club clients have adopted this simple system. You can set up a system like this for your home computer as well. I encourage you to try this approach or modify it a bit so it works well for you. E-mail can be a big time waster, so make sure you have a system that makes this part of your life easier.
Let’s come back to filing paper now. My best advice is to categorize everything. Use hanging files, and consider not wasting time by placing manila file folders inside hanging file folders. Color code your hanging files by category using colored files, tabs, or both. The category should be indicated by a colored tab at the far left, followed by staggered, coordinating tabs for the related subjects and topics in each category. For example, “marketing” might be the category, “direct mail” might be the subject, “catalog” might be the topic, and the number, title, or item might be the “Summer 2008 issue” of the catalog.
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Rapid-Fire Time-Saver #9
Respond to mail by telephone or e-mail when you can. If possible, delegate this task.
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Outline your color system in a word-processing document, and save it digitally for easy reference in the event that your assistant, another coworker, or a family member must access the files. For example, purple might be action files; green, client files; blue, research and reference; yellow, administrative; and red, marketing. Document the color choices, and then create an index or a table of contents listing the files in each category. Update this index regularly. This takes a little time up front but saves time in the long run.
Next, a messy, disorganized desk will weigh you down. In fact, according to what I call the Principle of Correspondence, your outer life is a mirror image of your inner life. Everything you say and do, including your level of organization, is a reflection of the real you! If you constantly have a cluttered work area, it’s a sign that you’ve got stress and turmoil going on inside that needs to be dealt with. The simple act of cleaning up your work area can make you feel more in control of your life and can help you be more effective, more efficient, and more optimistic. Often as you go higher and higher in organizations, the desks get cleaner and cleaner. And that’s no coincidence.
Most importantly, the cleaner your work area and the fewer things on your desk, the more you will get done. Consider investing in a high-quality scanner and losing most of the paper. You can apply the same organizing principles and categories described above to your computer files as well.
Vital Time Tactic #3: Handle Reading Material More Efficiently
To be effective in today’s rapidly changing society, you must stay up on current events and developments in your industry. Following are three keys to handling reading material:
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Rapid-Fire Time-Saver #10
Develop a mastermind group of success-minded people who can accelerate your progress toward your goals.
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First, become a speed-reader. A course in speed-reading will enable you to double or triple your reading speed almost instantly. I more than doubled my speed in the first two hours. Online courses are available, as well as seminars and CD learning systems. Courses in PhotoReading and accelerated learning are proven approaches you may also want to investigate. The remarkable results you get from practicing these simple methods will surprise you.
Another way to accelerate your reading is to go straight to a book’s table of contents, decide which chapter is most important to you, and then read that chapter or mark it for future reference. You may find that the material is not even worth reading, which of course shortens the allotted time considerably.
For business information, read only top-priority articles in magazines, publications, journals, newsletters, and so on. Again, read the tab
le of contents, pick the items that are of the most interest to you, go right to those items, tear out the pages, and put the pages in your “to read” file. Then throw the rest of the magazine away. I recommend that you always take that file with you to read during what I call transition time—when you’re waiting for an appointment, standing in line, or traveling. Train yourself to read only what’s most important to you, nothing else. If you’re fortunate enough to have an assistant, ideally you want to go through the table of contents, circle what’s of interest to you, and ask your assistant to tear out the pages, put them in a file, and shove them into your hands on the way out of the office. Also, whenever you’re reading or reviewing correspondence, stand up! Your mind will stay more focused and alert, and you’ll get done much faster.
You may want to take advantage of services that provide a synopsis or overview of various books and articles. Written and audio summaries are available, as well as podcasts. I’ve made use of these for many years now and have cut out four or five hours of reading each week.
Vital Time Tactic #4: Handle Everything Once and Only Once
Success Is Not an Accident Page 11