Time Management Techniques Can Increase Production – Steps Guaranteed to Cure or Kill – Part 1

Time Management is a big subject. I mean, you can actually branch into philosophy on this one, and I could make some hearty study recommendations to anyone who is serious about tapping into the magic of controlling time. But before we go off the deep end, let’s at least make an effort to discover what we individually can do to improve our use of time.

We seem to be constantly falling behind, striving to catch up, or despairing under the work load that burdens us. So we longingly wonder if there is any way to control or manage time. Happily, the answer is Yes.

It begins with defining your terms. If you are thinking of it as “sands trickling through the hour glass,” time will always control you. So first let’s nail down some more workable definitions.

TIME: Point at which something happens. [Merriam Webster’s]

MANAGEMENT: The process of dealing with or controlling things or people. [New Oxford Dictionary]

That makes time management a process of deciding what you want to occur with things and people, and getting it to happen. The opposite of time management would be letting things slide. If you are letting things slide, your company, your career, your life is likely to be most unsatisfying. The fun really begins when we grab the steering wheel of our own lives and hit the accelerator.

Here is a step by step procedure you can do in your office or home that could dramatically improve your time management – practical actions guaranteed to cure or kill. Why should you take the trouble to learn better control of time? You will secure for yourself a much accelerated, far more rewarding future. So let’s begin.

1. Set aside a few hours some evening or weekend.

2. From an office store pick up a set of 3 communication baskets for yourself and each member of your business or family and some file folders.

3. Go to your desk, table or workspace and brace yourself for the toughest moment.

4. Pull out every unanswered letter, memo or dispatch, anything incomplete with your finances, all the half-done projects, everything incomplete you have lying around anywhere, and put them ALL on your desk. This includes papers piling up on your dresser, in the trunk of your car, in your briefcase – drag it all out.

Hey,I know about your email in-box with 500+ pending emails, but let’s leave that out of the picture for now and just stick with the solid stuff.

How much will you find? I worked with a CPA in Houston who had a desk the size of a barge. He disappeared on the other side of the desk on this step, with stacks of paper and boxes several feet high.

Even worse, I once did this action on a business owner in San Diego and when we got to his home office, he broke the news to me that everything wouldn’t all fit on his desk. He took me to see his “pending” 3-car garage. It was piled to the ceiling with incomplete projects and stuff. He was pointing out things to me when he discovered a motorcycle buried in there he had forgotten he owned! (True story.)

5. The next step can also be a bit gruesome at first but rapidly gets better as you go through it. You do one of the “four D’s” on each item, one at a time.

· DO IT.

· DUMP IT.

· DELEGATE IT.

· DELAY IT.

Pick up and handle just one item at a time per the four D’s. Just plow through it. One lady chiropractor burst into tears when I asked her to pick up the first piece of paper atop the huge pile in front of her. Surely you’re tougher than that. The worst it could do is kill you.

Here are some rules of thumb. If you can knock it out in 10 minutes or less, JUST DO IT.

If it’s not a valuable document, and you haven’t needed it in the last 6 months (or if you can pull it off the web when you need it), DUMP IT.

If it’s really not your job, DELEGATE IT to whoever should do it, getting their agreement as needed (for now just put it in one of the baskets you procured and put a name label on it.

6. When you have handled every particle, those papers and projects that remain go into your pending stack, which we will take up in Time Management Techniques Guaranteed to Cure or Kill – Part 2. Meanwhile, here are some additional tips when you are doing the “4D’s.”

WARNING! Do Not Just Shuffle Papers

I worked with a financial planner in Sacramento who operated from his sprawling ranch-style home, working off his kitchen table. When I commented that it seemed an unusual place to run his business, he asked if I wanted to see his office! It was piled so high that he had had to move to his kitchen table to work. His huge walk-in pantry was filled to the roof with papers and documents that he just shuffled and put back, not completing a thing, saving everything for “when he had time.”

When I asked where he had learned to handle work like that he told me about his former boss, a CPA. It turned out that CPA had gone bankrupt. Probing further, his father had the same habit pattern. And as a result, his kids (including my client) had recently moved him into an old folks home, not because he had health problems; he had just filled his home so full of stuff that he wouldn’t throw out that he could no longer move around in it!

You can go a bit extreme in the other direction, too. A VP in a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson had just returned from a 2-week vacation the day we were starting his Productivity & Time Management program. When we got to the 4 D’s, he asked his secretary if she’d taken all the important documents out of a stack about two feet high, and when she said yes, he took the entire stack and dropped it in the trash, commenting to the startled consultant that if it was important, they’d write him back. This is not recommended.

This is a very challenging regimen. In fact, it may be too tough for most mere mortals.

The end result can be astounding. Here’s a hint. We have had conservative business executives get up on their desk and do a jig when they completed these steps. Maybe you will, too! Now you are ready for Part 2.

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