Information
and Skills You Need to Get Ahead
Revise
Your Definition of Work
One of the most
common side effects of the Age of Speed is blurred boundaries between work and
home, according to Vince Poscente in The Age of Speed. Although
work no longer keeps us chained to desks, we’re experiencing an “always-on”
phenomenon. Whether it’s an email, text
message, instant message or cell phone call, we’re almost always accessible.
The big blur
between free time and work time makes us feel that our overall time is
compromised and
that it isn’t ours to control. No matter
how fast we think we’re going, it seems harder and harder to dedicate time to the
things we feel are significant.
Time has been
associated with physical boundaries for more than a century. We got
used to the idea
that we work when we are in the office or at the factory. We do chores when we
are in the kitchen. We relax when we are in the living room or at the park.
This made time easy to define: work, home, leisure.
Today, however,
work is no longer a place; it’s a state of mind. Instead of three distinct segments
of time, we have ended with one large pie of time filled with a constantly morphing
mixture of work, home and leisure.
When we stop
applying the work-home-leisure framework to our time and start
applying a
framework based on values, we shift from a choked perspective focused on spatial
context and tasks to an open, conscious perspective based on what we value and
what we want to accomplish. In the Age of Speed, our time is more fluid — and
that should be working in our favor, not making us feel stressed out and
exhausted.
When we
implement the values-based time model in our lives, time becomes the tool we use
to organize our priorities and values rather than our duties and location, and
how we spend our time reflects who we are rather than where we are or what
we’re doing.
If we stop
judging our time according to outdated definitions of work, home and
leisure, we are
less likely to feel stressed out about the blurred lines. If we stop forcing
the separation between those three areas of our lives, we won’t suffer when
they merge —instead, we’ll find solutions.
The
Challenge Is to Simplify Your Life
Everyone has too
much to do and too little time today, Brian Tracy points out in How the
Best Leaders Lead. You feel overwhelmed with your duties, tasks and
responsibilities. As a leader, those duties, tasks and responsibilities are
multiplied. The challenge is for you to simplify your life in such a way that
you spend more time doing the things that are most important to you and less
time doing those things that are not at all important.
A great leader
is someone who is effective, positive, in control, generally content and even-keeled.
If you are overwhelmed, you are probably none of these things. Simplifying your
life will not only make you a happier person; it will significantly increase
your success as a leader.
Here are six
methods, techniques and strategies that Tracy suggests you can use to
reorganize and
restructure your life, simplify your activities, get more done, and enjoy more
personal time and time with your family than ever before:
1.
Determine your true values.
Decide exactly
what is most important to you. The most important question that you must ask and
answer throughout your life is, “What do I really want to do with my life?” Set
peace of mind as your highest goal, and then organize your life around it.
2.
Decide exactly what you want.
Start deciding
what you want by writing out a list of at least 10 goals, that you would like
to accomplish in the next year. After you have written out this list, review
the 10 goals and then ask, “What one goal, if I achieved it in the next 24
hours, would have the greatest positive impact on my life?”
3.
Select your major definite purpose.
Your most
important goal becomes your major definite purpose. Then make a list of
everything you
can think of that you can do to achieve that goal. Organize the list by priority,
by what is more important and what is less important. Then immediately begin the
most important thing that you identified to achieve your most important goal.
4.
Get your life in balance.
The key to balance
is to be sure that your exterior activities are congruent and in alignment with
your interior values. A sense of happiness, peace, joy and relief comes when
you return to your values and make sure that everything you do is consistent
with them.
5.
Put your relationships first.
Put the most
important people in your life at the top of your list of priorities. Put
everything else below them.
6.
Take excellent care of your physical health.
You can simplify
your life by eating less, eating better, exercising regularly, getting thinner,
getting regular medical and dental check-ups, eating proper nutrients and
taking excellent care of yourself.
Get
to the Heart of Things
Gary Keller and
Jay Papasan pose this question in The ONE Thing: If everyone
has the same
number of hours in a day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than
others? The answer is they make getting to the heart of things the heart of
their approach. They go small.
“Going small” is
ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should
do. It’s
recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that
matter most. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined
by how narrow you can make the focus. When you go as small as possible, you’ll
be staring at ONE Thing.
The challenge is
that life doesn’t line everything up for us and say, “Here’s where
you should
start.” So instead, every day you should line up your priorities anew,
find the lead
domino, and whack away at it until it falls. This approach works because extraordinary
success is sequential, not simultaneous. The domino effect applies to the big
picture, like your work or business, and it applies to the smallest moment in
each day when you’re deciding what to do next.
Success builds on success. The key is over time. Success is built
sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.
The idea of
balance is exactly that — a grand yet not very practical idea. In your
effort to attend
to all things, everything gets shortchanged, and nothing gets its due.
When we say
we’re out of balance, we’re usually referring to a sense that some priorities —
things that matter to us — are being underserved or unmet. The problem is that when
you focus on what is truly important, something will always be underserved.
There will always be things left undone. Leaving some things undone is a necessary
tradeoff for results. But you can’t leave everything
undone, and
that’s where counterbalancing comes in. You must counterbalance your work and
personal life buckets.
• Counterbalance
your work bucket.
View work as
involving a skill or knowledge that must be mastered. This will cause you to
give disproportionate time to your ONE Thing and will throw the rest of your
workday, week, month and year out of balance. Your work life is divided into
two areas: what matters most and everything else. You will have to take what matters
to the extremes
and be OK with what happens to the rest. Professional success
requires it.
• Counterbalance
your personal life bucket.
Acknowledge that
your life has multiple areas and that each requires a minimum of attention for
you to feel that you “have a life.” Drop any one, and you’ll feel the effects.
This requires constant awareness. You must never go too long or too far without
counterbalancing them so that they are all active areas of your life. Your
personal life
requires it.
The question of
balance is really a question of priority. When you change your
language from
balancing to prioritizing, you see your choices more clearly. When you’re supposed
to be working, work, and when you’re supposed to be playing, play. It’s a weird
tightrope you’re walking, but it’s only when you get your priorities mixed up
that things fall apart.
Focus
on Results
Success comes
not just from hard work and careful planning — though those are both important.
Success depends in large part on proper mindset: focusing on the
results you plan
to achieve rather than the number of hours you work, Robert C. Pozen attests in
Extreme Productivity.
Many
professionals have trouble getting started on their highest priorities.
Instead, they procrastinate by distracting themselves with more pleasant tasks.
Chronic procrastinators pay a high personal price for their habit. As the
deadline nears, they go into panic mode.
Pozen suggests
that you break the project into smaller pieces and get going on the first steps.
Clear your docket, set aside time to concentrate on the big project, and cut
off access to distractions. You can help yourself by creating evenly spaced,
mini-deadlines —interim dates for completing specific stages of the project.
Focus on
results, not hours. Punching a time clock made sense in the industrial age,
but it makes no
sense for professionals. Your contribution is not the time you spend on your
work but the value you create through your knowledge.
Though attention
to detail is usually considered a positive attribute, your time
commitment
should vary according to the importance of the project and the needs of your
audience. It may take you one day to do B+ work, but the rest of the week to
bump it up to an A. For your highest-ranked objectives and targets, it is
usually worth spending that extra time and effort. But for most of your
low-priority tasks, B+ is quite often “good enough.”
One technique
for not sweating the small stuff is to follow the principle of OHIO:
“Only Handle It
Once.” This means tackling your low priority items immediately when you receive
them, if possible. If you let a backlog develop, you will waste a lot of time and
increase your anxiety level.
For example,
every day you receive a barrage of requests for your time and
knowledge from
your co-workers, family, friends and people you don’t know. When
you get a
request, decide promptly whether you should ignore it or offer a response. Respond immediately to important requests. Don’t waste time by having to re-find an email
or think twice about an appointment. Waiting
— for an hour, a day or a week — to respond to a legitimate request will double
or triple the time involved. In the best case, you have to reread the request and
think again about the issues it raises. In
the worst case, you will spend a significant amount of time trying to find the request
again.
Multitasking is
a good way of accomplishing low-priority tasks efficiently. Don’t try
to multitask if
both activities are mentally demanding. The rapid switching between
topics wastes
your brain’s energy. And don’t multitask in front of actual or potential
customers; they
expect your full attention.
Avoid the
tendency to micromanage. Give your
subordinates significant freedom
to complete
projects, even if you think that could lead to a higher risk of mistakes.
What’s the point
of getting more done in less time? The point is not just to build a
more rewarding
career but also to enjoy a more rewarding life. The more efficient you are at
work, the more time you’ll have for your family, your friends, and other
aspects of life that you care about.
Manage
Your Energy
Time is the
currency of productivity, and how you handle it will ultimately determine your
success or failure, Todd Henry points out in The Accidental Creative.
When you are
planning your life, you need to account for every commitment
you make in
every area. This means that when you are in a busy season at work,
you need to be
disciplined enough to trim back the number of personal commitments you make.
Similarly, when you are entering a busy season in your personal life, you need
to be purposeful about the extra commitments you take on from work. While you can’t always choose what you work
on, you can be careful and strategic about where you focus your energy outside of
those core commitments.
There are three
horizons of whole-life planning: weekly, monthly and quarterly.
It is critical
to get ahead of your energy commitments and examine them objectively. Saying no to a new opportunity is very difficult
in the moment, but if you have been strategic in your planning and know what a new
commitment will truly cost you, then you can refuse new opportunities with
confidence.
Once you
understand your limits, you will be able to manage your energy more
effectively.
Remember, this is about setting yourself up to have conceptual breakthroughs in
the areas of your life and work that matter most.
A second
energy-management practice closely related to whole-life planning is
pruning. In a
good vineyard, the vine keeper is constantly pruning, but it’s
not that the
pruned branches are dead or diseased in some way. Rather, the keeper
removes young,
unproductive branches so that much-needed nutrients can get to the older,
fruit-bearing parts of the vine. If the young growth isn’t pruned back, the
vine will bear less fruit and eventually produce none at all.
The same
principle of nature applies to the natural rhythms of your creative process. Every day there are little sprouts of growth that
emerge in your life. New opportunities, new projects, new ways to expend your energy.
Distractions. Temptations to divert your resources or attention. Just as the young,
fruit-bearing branches on a vine must be pruned back in order to provide needed
resources to the critical sections of the whole plant, you must learn to
identify the activities in your life that seem to be providing good results in
the short run but will eventually decrease your effectiveness in the most
critical areas of your life.
A MANAGER’S VIEW OF TIME MANAGEMENT
In a recent Executive
Insights interview, Elise Roma, General Manager, Franklin-
Covey Northeast
Region was interviewed by Soundview host Andrew Clancy. Here is
an excerpt from
that interview.
Soundview:
Do you think that people often feel they don’t have time for
time
management?
Elise
Roma: I think that’s really true because when people start to get
urgency addicted and are so busy, they can mistakenly define that as
productive. So again, it goes back to that definition of “What is productive?” And oftentimes, we hear people say that they
are overwhelmed — that they’re burnt out — they may or may not be achieving their
goals, but they are so busy. And then when you start to work with them on a solution,
the first thing that comes up is that they don’t have time. They ask, “Can we
do it in 10 minutes?” “Can we do it in an hour?” And so most people, I think, are reluctant to
take the time necessary to make real changes that would have significant impact
on the results of improving productivity.
Soundview:
In your own role as a general manager, how do you budget
your own time and also make sure the needs of your staff are met?
Roma:
Well, I typically have time before the week starts when I
plan. And so I know what the most important things are that I want to
accomplish. And I’ll allocate time for those. And during that, I’ll try to make
sure I turn away from my computer so that the instant messages aren’t popping
up, and I’ll try to put my cell phone away. Because that’s the only way I can
actually focus on those tasks.
I do have weekly
staff meetings and also some routine meetings that are pretty carved in stone.
The rest of the time, because the nature of my job is being available to my
team who are servicing customers, I try to create an incredible amount of
flexibility where I’m accessible to them all day for any time that is not
devoted specifically to another most important task. I try to answer their
phone calls instantly because I assume that that is really the most efficient way
not to hold up their progress. So I try to do a little balance of both. Most
members of my team know that they don’t have to wait if they’ve got an urgent
issue until our weekly meeting; they just call me, and we just handle it immediately.
Leaving a lot of
actual space on your calendar — it gets filled. But when you don’t leave space,
what happens is things don’t get done that are really both urgent and
important. And those things come up every single week. And so if you don’t fully
pack your calendar, you can address those urgent and important issues and not necessarily
delay anything else.
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