by Eileen Roth
Consider what calls are the most important today and mark their priority order on your To Do List, accounting for any time zone differences. Gather all of the relevant material you need for all your calls, which usually includes your datebook/organizer, any relevant papers, and perhaps your To Discuss List (see Chapter 16). If you have several issues to cover, start with the most important items on the list so that if the other person is suddenly called away, your top priorities have been taken care of.
Balancing incoming and outgoing calls: Stopping phone tag
Just as you plan your time for incoming and outgoing calls, so may the people you try to reach (especially if you give all your associates copies of this book as gifts). If those schedules don’t mesh, you could be caught in an endless game of telephone tag. The way to avoid this is to leave messages that say more than “You’re it.”
Before placing a call, plan the message you want to leave if you get voice mail or an assistant. State what information you have to relay or the question you need to ask, and give a good time to call you back, preferably during a time you expect to be taking calls. If a return e-mail, fax, or call to your assistant would be sufficient, say so.
Appointments and meetings
It seems that nothing can get done without a meeting. Yet, meetings can also be big time wasters. When you plan or decide whether to attend a meeting, use the Five Ws plus How as your guide.
Considering why and who
Why even have a meeting? To decide which meetings you should attend, ask yourself what benefits each one offers you. If you can’t come up with a compelling list, drop the meeting from your schedule if you can (discuss this with your boss first if necessary). For recurrent meetings, consider whether you really need to go to every one, or whether there’s some way the meetings could be improved.
Good reasons to have a meeting are: to plan or execute a team project, fill everyone in on the status of a project and get feedback, brainstorm ideas, create cohesion, build relationships, or inspire. If your purpose is strictly to disseminate information in one direction, consider a written report instead.
Who needs to attend? The general rule is that the more people in a meeting, the longer the meeting takes and the more resources it diverts from other priorities, so consider your participant list carefully. Many meetings can also benefit from bringing in outsiders. You may want to hire a speaker or trainer in a given area, or engage a consultant for special expertise or a broader perspective. Write down your list of meeting participants and use the list to track who will be there as people respond, and to follow up with those you haven’t heard from. When you’re invited to a meeting, you may want to check who will be there before deciding whether to attend.
Deciding what and when
What do you need to discuss? Every meeting should have an agenda. Typing up and sending out the agenda in advance can make your meeting run more smoothly, as participants will be better prepared to discuss topics and can ask to add items you may not be aware of.
When should you meet? The three time factors to consider for your meeting are time of day, day of the week, and for recurrent meetings, frequency. Monday morning is a good time to discuss what everyone is doing for the week. Friday afternoon can serve for a wrap-up. A midweek meeting works well for troubleshooting. Evening meetings may get the best attendance on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, while Sunday night is a good pick for a family meeting. You want to schedule appointments and meetings for your off-peak time. Don’t worry about performing; the stimulus of the situation can get you going, and your peak time will remain free for projects requiring concentration.
If you are in charge of the meeting, especially a staff meeting, you may want to survey the participants to find out how many of your staff are morning versus afternoon people, and then set the time to coincide with the majority’s off-peak period.
Set an ending time for your meeting and stick to it. Ending the meeting on time not only encourages efficient use of time and a brisk approach to your agenda, but a punctual stopping point shows your consideration toward attendees. Being able to plan the rest of the day is important for people, whether getting to another appointment, completing a project, or getting home in time to spend some time with the kids before tucking them into bed.
Knowing where and how
Where to meet? Is this a small meeting at the table in your office, or do you need a conference room? Maybe going offsite would be better to keep everyone from being distracted or to spark new ideas. Restaurant meetings are great for relationship-building but not so good for actually getting things done. In general, breakfast and lunch meetings are more business-oriented and brief, while dinner may be mostly or purely social and can stretch on for hours, which, depending upon your goal, may or may not be good.
How to meet? The purpose of your meeting will determine the setup of the event — a small table for a brainstorming session, a semicircle of chairs or U-shaped table arrangement for a seminar, separate tables or classroom style for a workshop, an auditorium with media capabilities for a big presentation. If you have a speaker or someone is presenting, be sure to arrange all the technical requirements in advance. These days, many people carry presentations on their laptop computers. Can you all gather around and see, or do you need a special projector? Are there handouts to be reproduced? Should there be water, flowers, company logos or banners, promotional items to take away? If you plan meetings often, create a form covering all these details.
Meetings take up everybody’s valuable time, so make sure there are no interruptions unless there’s a certifiable emergency. Have the phones covered and ask people to turn off their cell phones and beepers. Close the door and tell visitors you’re busy. Remember that the number of people in the room multiplies every minute wasted.
Never go to a meeting without something to take notes with, your planner, and your business cards. See Chapter 21 for more about handling offsite appointments and meetings. Finally, the main point of a meeting is oral communication, so brush up those skills on both the talking and listening side: talk slowly, listen carefully, and take notes — no matter what, give handouts, and talk back.
Finally, if your meeting occurs regularly, consider how frequent it really needs to be. Could you push your weekly meeting to biweekly and still stay on top of the game? If a monthly meeting always seems to run too long and has an overloaded agenda, maybe you need to get together more often.
Reading and writing: Written communication
Have you noticed how much more the computer has encouraged reading and writing? If you’re not as skilled in written communications as you’d like to be, you may wish to get up to speed by reading a writing guidebook. In the meantime, here are a few tips from a time-management perspective.
Writing: Draft and revision
Write drafts. Your composition teacher wasn’t kidding when he said that writing improves with rewriting, and this is true for everything from a report to a letter, for amateurs and pros alike. Do you know how many drafts of these chapters I’ve gone through? And you may still think there’s room to improve. Though it may sound paradoxical, writing a few drafts of a document can actually save time, and here’s the trick: Write the first one fast. How good the draft is doesn’t matter, because you’re going to come back and revise. Your first draft can even be bad. You’ll be amazed how your writing speed picks up when you take a redraft approach and how much better the final product is.
Whenever possible, let a draft sit overnight so you can revise it with a fresh eye. Much longer, though, and you can forget what you meant to say to begin with.
Reading: How to skim
News flash: Just because someone wrote a word doesn’t mean that you have to read it. No, I’m not suggesting that you put this book down and walk away. What I mean is that some words mean more than others. Skip the small words like and and the and cut to the chase of those longer nouns and verbs that give a sentence meaning. If you look at a lengthy article
or report, it often helps to skim first, reading the headline, all the subheads, and possibly the first line or two of each paragraph to see if you really want to read the whole thing. An outline, abstract, or table of contents can also tell you where a document is going. Check before plunging in to determine the value of the content and prepare your mind for what’s to come.
When reading a reference book in sections like this one, remember that you don’t have to read it straight through. Use the table of contents to find the parts you want. In fact, if you look at the front of this book you see that the nice ...For Dummies people have provided an ultradetailed table of contents for your speed-reading pleasure. Thank you! The same goes for the news-paper. You’re under no obligation to read anything but the columns and articles of interest to you. Use the headlines as your clue.
When you read for content — to find out about something or absorb technical information — keep a clear ruler and a red pen on hand to underline important passages. Then go back to review the underlined parts and use a highlighter to pick out key points only.
When you highlight points as you read, you’re likely to go overboard. Have you ever finished a chapter and found most of it was yellow? Underlining first helps you focus on the truly important stuff the second time around.
See Chapter 16 on information flow for how to create a To Read File in the Take Action File system.
Socializing
Humans are social creatures. In fact, for many people one of the big rewards of getting organized is having more time to hang out, and making connections can be as important to your career as it is to your mental health. But accidental socializing or going overboard can eat up your time, perhaps taking up hours you’d really rather spend with someone else. I suggest conscious socializing as a strategy for making the most of your interpersonal time.
Put a coffee warmer on your desk so you don’t have to get up for a hot cup every time your coffee cools.
Schedule regular breaks, especially a lunch break, to reenergize yourself. You’ll work more efficiently as a result, and knowing when your breaks are supposed to be prevents you from using them to procrastinate.
Keep all the tools you need right at your fingertips to prevent trips that may entail running into people. See Chapter 15 on setting up your desk for more.
Look at the road ahead — a long expanse of green lights, all perfectly timed. Enjoy the flow and go!
Chapter 20
Maximizing Your Personal Time
In This Chapter
Doing everything faster and better
Trying new tips and nifty tricks
Saving just enough time to really organize
Making more time for the best time of your life
P rogress is a funny thing. With every new invention for doing things faster and better, people just accumulate more obligations and commitments rather than additional free time. You have to keep up to speed on the speediest way to do things just to stay in place. If you actually want to have more time to enjoy your life, you need to be crafty indeed. This is a shortcut chapter jam-packed with ideas for making the most of the time of your life.
Some time-savers are timeless. Others are new, enabled by technology or a more evolved brain. In the following text you’ll find a combination of classic and current ideas to make you better at everything from money to love. Organization is more fun than you may think!
If You’re Overwhelmed, Read This First
Many people have a hard time getting organized because carving out the five minutes here, the hour there, or a weekend afternoon needed to start the systems presented in this book can be tough. The quick and easy tips in this chapter can help you create those windows of time by expediting tasks more efficiently. Line up a few together, and you have an hour to start your filing system.
The other advantage of these practical, everyday tips is that each one represents a small step that can take you closer to your goal of getting organized, while improving your quality of life as you go. If you’re overwhelmed, spend a month, which is about the amount of time required to train your mind, putting these principles into action, and then you’ll be ready to tackle the rest of the book.
Getting Out of the House
For most of us, mornings aren’t peak time for clear thinking, so simply getting out of the house can be one of the day’s most daunting jobs. You can take the rigor out of rise and shine by planning your morning just like a project. With a morning plan, everything can go smoothly when you need to coast along the most, enabling you to glide out the door and meet the challenges of your day. Table 20-1 can help.
Table 20-1Your Morning Timetable Activity Time
Be at your destination: _______
Subtract: Travel time - _______
Leave your house at: _______
Subtract: Time to dress, eat, childcare,
pet care, read paper - _______
Wake up at: _______
Subtract: Hours of sleep needed - _______
Go to bed at: _______
Work walking out the door backward, and you end up with a plan for not just getting out of bed, but for getting into bed the night before. One smooth sweep from today to tomorrow ensures you stay caught up on your sleep.
Is that late night talk show or novel you can’t put down coming between you and your beauty rest? Tape the show and watch the tape while cooking dinner the next day. Find a different time slot for your reading that presents less temptation. Staying up too late tonight mortgages the quality of tomorrow.
With your morning plan in hand, do some preassembly to get you out and about without even needing to engage your brain. The night before, get ready for the next day by doing the following:
Put everything you need by the door you exit from in the morning—briefcase (including reading material, files, and organizer), laptop, keys, purse/wallet, audiotapes, umbrella, and so on. (See Chapter 4 for more on the flight deck approach.)
Plan your clothes the night ahead. (Organizing your closet according to the principles in Chapter 6 can help.) Check the forecast on the late night news or the World Wide Web. If you live in a volatile climate such as my hometown of Chicago, you may want to have two outfits in mind and tune in to the early morning weather report. Know the report time of your favorite radio station so you don’t miss the weather while you’re in the shower.
Keep a clock in the bathroom and set it five minutes fast.
Organize your toiletries, makeup, and hair accessories according to the principles of P-L-A-C-E (see Chapter 7).
Make a morning routine that you follow in the same order every day. For instance:
1.Walk the dog
2.Exercise
3.Shower (and shave)
4.Dress
5.Makeup
6.Hair
7.Eat breakfast/read paper
8.Pack lunches
9.Outta here!
Ladies, if you’d like to keep lipstick off your clothes and your hair in place, don pullover tops before you apply makeup and style your hair. Button-down blouses, sweaters, and jackets can go on after your grooming routine is complete to prevent showers of powder and stray hairs from landing on your clothes.
Buy a coffeemaker with an automatic timer to make the coffee every morning before you even reach the kitchen. Some even have a self-timed grinder so your beans are ultra-fresh.
Take the train or bus instead of driving to save gas and use the extra time to read the paper, review reports, catch up on e-mail on a laptop, or write thank-you notes.
Shopping and Errands
Even those who are born to shop can use a few ways to get the job done faster. From buying a fabulous new outfit to running routine errands, you can benefit by consolidating your destinations into one fell swoop instead of darting hither and yon. Setting up shopping and errand routines can save time and regularize your schedule. And with home delivery and the Internet, you don’t even have
to leave the house to accomplish many acquiring missions. Here are some tips to get your shopping done while the clock is ticking:
Run all your errands at once to save time and gas. Block the time out in your calendar and go.
Run errands on the way to somewhere else. If the dry cleaner is on the way to work, drop your clothes off in the morning and pick them up on the way home. Think like a map.
Shop the supermarket only once a week, on the same day. This will help you get your act together as laid out in Chapter 5. Need fresh fish? Decide whether a specialty store or the grocery store offers the best time/money tradeoff. Run out of milk? Hit the convenience store once—then adjust your quantity in the future.
Saving your time: Personal services
Why run an errand or do the weekly drudgery when people can come to your house and do chores for you? You’re busy with work and/or family, right? In the age of personal services, you can spend less of your life on the little details. Here are some ideas:
Order groceries by phone or online and have them delivered.
When you’re really in a rush to get dinner on the table, hit these stops in the supermarket: the take-out counter, the deli/prepared foods counter, the bakery, the salad bar, the produce section for prewashed salad in a bag, and the refrigerator section for fresh pastas and sauces.