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Time Management Notes 1
Time Management Notes 1
Time management is the process of planning and controlling how much time to
spend on specific activities. Good time management enables an individual to
complete more in a shorter period of time, lowers stress, and leads to career
success.
A lot of people believe money is their most important resource but we think
they’re misguided. Their most important resource is time.
You can get more money through various avenues but once time is gone, it’s gone
forever. You can’t buy more or borrow more, so time is a limited resource that
expires every day. As a business owner, you have to be very careful with this
precious resource.
Other people are more than willing to take your time. You’ve undoubtedly
experienced getting stuck on a phone call or having someone drop by your office
without an appointment. Some people think that because you’re a business owner
and have more control over your time, you have more availability. They don’t
realize they’re wasting precious minutes or can’t understand why you’re unable to
get together with them at inconvenient times (family and friends can be the worst
culprits).
To better guard your time, consider these time thieves and how you can control
them:
1. Email. We’re all bombarded with email and it’s one of the worst offenders. It’s
easy to develop a habit of constantly checking your email, especially when one of
those little windows appears on your monitor telling you a new one has arrived.
Who can stand the suspense? But this can be a huge time waster. Consider setting
aside certain times each day to read and answer email, and learn to resist the
temptation to even glace at your Inbox outside those times.
2. Meetings at inconvenient times. Scheduling a meeting at 2:00 instead of 1:00 can
blow your entire afternoon if it chops up your day. Figure out a scheduling process
that will work for most days and try to stick to it. For example, we schedule 2-hour
client meetings at 8:00, 10:00, 1:00 and 3:00 so we can work four clients into a
day. Scheduling someone at 9:00 or 2:00 limits the number of clients we can see.
3. Not creating or sticking to agendas. Meetings can get totally out of hand if
people are allowed to go off on rabbit trails. Not following an agenda and
controlling how the meeting progresses will waste your time.
4. Not having a gatekeeper. Whenever possible, even the smallest business needs
someone to screen calls. This can be accomplished through in-house staff or an
answering service. Your gatekeeper serves as a shield between you and solicitors,
or calls that might not fit into your schedule and would be a disruption.
5. Doing too many of the little things. An unwillingness to delegate work to others
can rob you of time you could spend more profitably elsewhere. It can also steal
your personal time by forcing you to work later to get everything done.
6. Not scheduling time for routine tasks. It’s easy to get busy and put off doing
some of the routine tasks in the business, like paying bills or quarterly taxes until
they become time-critical. Then you’re forced to give them your immediate
attention, whether or not it’s convenient. Your day is disrupted and your time
stolen.
You can either master your time or be a slave to it. You can allow other people to
steal your time or you can be in control. Time is your most valuable resource and
must be guarded carefully or you won’t have enough of it.
The office is a minefield of distraction. Between email, Slack, text messages,
social notifications, mobile alerts, and loud colleagues, we’re constantly
bombarded with potential time wasters.
So rather than only focus on what you should be doing more efficiently,
consider the detractors you can eliminate. Here are 10 of the biggest workplace
time wasters you should watch out for:
On one hand, they enable us to be more connected and tuned in than ever.
However, as well all know, this connectivity comes with a cost in productivity.
While the average person spends about three hours a day on their phone
(according to our research), the top 25% of users spend 4.5 hours or more.
This level of use can mostly be attributed to our natural brain chemistry. We’re
hardwired to receive a hit of the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine
whenever we get a notification. Yet because that pleasure is fleeting, we
continually seek it out. (It’s not wonder most people can’t go 15 minutes
without picking up their phone!)
How to avoid getting sucked into your smartphone during the workday
The fix, of course, isn’t just to throw your phone out. But rather to make it less
of a time waster. At one extreme, you can delete all distracting apps. But at the
minimum turn off all notifications and try to have a few sessions where you go
into do-not-disturb mode during working hours. Your notifications will still be
waiting for you once the day is done.
Want to know how much time you actually spend on your phone each day? Find
out how RescueTime for iOS and Android can help.
Studies have consistently found that the majority of people have lower
performance when trying to do multiple tasks at once (unless you’re part of
the 2.5 percent of people who can multitask effectively.)
How to avoid multitasking and stay focused on your most important work
You don’t necessarily need scientific evidence to see that multitasking becomes
a massive time waster. Your workplace task juggling has the same effect as
texting while driving (just slightly less dangerous).
This doesn’t mean you should work in a barren, stark workspace. In fact,
making your space your own with family photos, plants, and other personal
items makes sure you feel at ease and enjoy coming into the workspace each
day.
5. Unhealthy nutrition and hydration habits
You probably don’t think of food as a time waster, but a drop of energy during
the day can make it difficult to get things done. Our bodies go through natural
ebbs and flows of energy throughout the day, and what you eat and drink will
determine whether you spend the day on a high, or barely make it through.
Writing is a perfect example. Rather than stress over the blank page, most
writers force themselves through a first draft and worry about editing later.
How to cut back the time communication eats out of your day:
It’s impossible for most of us to cut these tools out of our workday. But it can
be beneficial to limit their use. Consider working in short bursts or establishing
scheduled times to check in and respond when you’re not focused on something
else.
Managers and senior-level staff can help with this by setting better expectations
for response times, such as not requiring employees to communicate or respond
immediately.
Use this list to help identify your personal time wasters, and then squash them.
The less time these time wasters take, the more time you’ll have for meaningful
work.
Have you ever considered that you have a natural time management style type? Or
have you noticed that your friends and family members may approach managing
time differently than you? Have you ever wondered why certain people seem to be
better able to manage time than others? Do you take your personality traits and
habits into account when planning and scheduling tasks? Do you have any idea
how your personality type affects how you manage your time?
We all have natural behaviors regarding how we manage time and how we
organize our living and working spaces.
Sometimes everything seems to work well for us, but tension can arise when we
become inundated, over-scheduled and blocked with clutter.
When this happens, it’s important to understand our dominant time management
type so we are better able to work with our natural style preferences. If we don’t,
we can get in our own way, impede our best intentions and miss our goals.
Understanding what techniques, behaviors and products work for you, and
what does not, impacts the overall quality of your life.
There are six different personality types for managing time. Each person is
different. One may strongly align with one type as dominant, where others may
display behaviors of several. Read the list below, and see where you think you
resonate.
HOPPER TIME MANAGEMENT STYLE
The Hopper™ style maintains her energy by staying busy. A hopper loves
switching tasks, and finds having several tasks going at one time
exhilarating. Hoppers typically transition with ease, stopping one activity to
transition to something new. This style personality gets involved in many things,
and may have a difficult time completing tasks if there are too many brewing at
one time. As such – sometimes dominant hoppers may have a litany of incomplete
tasks, and struggle with follow-through.
How Hopper Time Management Personality Style Types Can Manage Time
More Effectively: When possible, Hoppers™ should eliminate distractions to
offer themselves more uninterrupted chunks of time in which to finish tasks.
Timers may help them stay on track. They will also find it helpful to be aware of
shifts in their energy levels to recognize when they need to take a break and
thereby reduce the odds of being distracted.
The Hyper Focus™ time management style is absorbed by detail and often
has trouble stopping one activity to transition to something new. This style
preference gets so involved in what they’re doing that they may ignore reminders
and cues to move on to the next priority. When Hyper Focus™ people are deeply
involved in the task at hand, they can become so absorbed in the details, that they
can lose track of time.
How Hyper Focus Time Management Personality Types Can Manage Time
More Effectively: It’s important for Hyper Focus™ people to work from a
prescribed plan and create natural bridges with strategies for moving from task to
task. They can benefit from using backwards planning and scheduling to determine
necessary project phases and start/finish dates, as well as chunking time into 20
minute segments.
BIG PICTURE TIME MANAGEMENT STYLE
Big Picture™ individuals are big thinkers but sometimes ignore details, or
may leave the details out of their plans entirely. Big Picture Personality Types
find details less attractive than global strategies. They are typically quick thinkers
and excel at tasks that call for spontaneity. Their lofty vision and high speed of
action can cause them to overlook or ignore the essential small pieces necessary for
success.
How Big Picture Time Management Types Can Manage Time More
Effectively: Big Picture types are much more effective when partnered with people
who will handle the details and follow-through on tasks. On their own, they need
to create simple, basic routines to follow, write things down, and make sure that
their communications are clear and precise.
Impulsive™ Time Management types love to leap but may forget to look first.
Enjoying the rush of adrenaline, they would rather act spontaneously than
follow a pre-set plan. However, lack of planning, or diminishing its importance,
can result in missed deadlines and letting others down. Impulsives tend to get
bored easily and can find routine and maintenance tasks distasteful. Impulsives run
into trouble when the feed their impulses more often than finishing tasks.
How Impulsive Time Management Personality Types Can Manage Time
More Effectively: It’s helpful for Impulsives™ to gain perspective by looking at
the bigger picture in order to make better decisions. They will benefit from longer-
term planning, routine reviews, and daily targets that allow time for spontaneity.
Posting mantras, intentions and reminders of their overall goals will often help
remind them to stay focused on their highest priorities.
CLIFF HANGER TIME MANAGEMENT STYLE
Cliff Hangers™ believe that they work most effectively when under the
pressure of a deadline. They like having an adrenaline rush which helps them
focus, but when they run their deadlines with this approach this often doesn’t leave
enough time to check work thoroughly or to handle things that might go wrong.
Waiting to start until the last moment often causes added stress, tension and even
missed deadlines.
How Cliff Hanger Time Management Personality Types Can Manage Time
More Effectively: Cliff Hangers™ need to monitor their time to better estimate
how long things really take to complete. They will benefit by identifying their
highest priorities and scheduling earlier start dates for those tasks. If they still
choose to procrastinate, it should be on the less significant priorities.
The more time you have, the more money you can make. I think this can be applied
to everyone’s professional lives and to a lot of personal lives as well. Anyone who
has a second business that they work at in their off time to earn passive income can
attest to that. And professionally speaking, I think it is common knowledge that if
we had more “time” at work, we would in fact make more money.
So how do we make more time? Is that even possible? Well, what it comes down
to is proper time management. This is a major factor in what makes me more
effective and more productive than a lot of my peers at work. I can simply get
more done than they can with the same amount of time.
How can you do it too? It is really pretty elementary. You need to simply employ
some of the basic tenets of time management in both your personal and
professional life. Once you do, you might see more “time” appear in your everyday
life and find that you are becoming more efficient at completing your tasks.
To help you get started, I’ve picked out the 5 most important pieces of the time
management concept and outlined them here for you:
3. Multitasking
Multitasking skills are a talent that not all of us possess. Realizing whether you are
the type of person that can do it or not is important. If you’re able to multitask,
great. If you’re not, then don’t bother trying. Many people make themselves less
effective by trying to multitask when they simply can’t do it. This leads to multiple
projects being started and none of them being finished, sloppy work, and
discouragement.
5. Reduce Interruptions
And finally, reduce the number of interruptions in your life. Realistically, you can’t
reduce the number of things that are going to interrupt you, but you can alter the
fashion in which you deal with them. If I am working on something important and
one of my employees comes to me with something that I know can be dealt with at
a later time, guess what? That’s exactly what I do. “Sure, we can get to that, but let
me finish what I am doing right now and then we’ll take care of it.” You see?
Respectfully, I put them off to complete what I was doing at the moment. On the
other hand, if my boss calls me when I’m in the middle of something, well, that’s
an interruption that is worth making a priority.
Final Word
Whether you are a salaried employee, self-employed, or a big-shot manager, more
time will allow you to focus on the most important tasks. Being prepared,
organized, and disciplined will give you the time necessary to become more
productive, which will ultimately lead to more money.
BUSINESS0
7 Steps to More Effective Time Management
Step 1 – Write A To Do List
Arming yourself with a daily to-do list is one of the most effective time
management strategies around. By knowing exactly what it is you need to do on
any given day, you are less likely to waste time on unnecessary tasks. A to-do list
that has been properly thought out will help you identify what is essential, and
what is largely unnecessary. I personally recommend checking off items as you
complete them; this will help you to retain focus and drive.
Deploy these time management strategies in your daily routine and enjoy
significantly enhanced productivity. In turn, this will result in you feeling more
confident and happy about yourself. You have the power to manage your time
properly, and now you have a toolkit of useful resources to ensure the job gets
done.