The Next
Step
Aimed at non-techy solutions
Recapping the paper & pencil starting of Time Management
101. The reason is to reduce worry about the actual media used per se; rather,
it is about changing your mindset about how you view your business time. There
is an intentional separation of personal and business time. Without this separation,
you become totally engulfed in the business and its stresses and demands. This
will lead to burnout, exhaustion, bad decisions or indecision, negative
physical symptoms, with the result being business and/or personal failure.
Starting with Color Coding (symbols later)
After a couple of weeks of penciling in your schedule and more importantly,
being accustomed to the time management idea in general, it is time to add some
new tricks. To facilitate “at a glance” visual interpretation of our planner I
recommend adding visual cues to make things easier to recognize. You can do
this with four-color inks pen sets that easily travel in the larger better
quality planners I recommended before. I use Black for routine entries, Red for
important “HOT” must do things, Green is used to line them out as complete
telling me at a glance that that item is “good to go”, and Blue is used for any
written and verbal communications such as emails, letters, and phone calls.
Prioritize
Just by the sheer nature of implementing the color-coding
system above, there is the forming of priorities easily recognized while
glancing at the planner throughout the day. For one thing, Red has my attention
all day until I line it out with Green. Blue tells me to try to get the door
closed in order to focus on calls, emails and letters without interruptions.
Everything else, in Black, is just my normal workflow.
Therefore, my To Do, Week at a Glance and Daily hour-to-hour notations
are easier to identify as the day progresses. This method has helped me considerably
in every high-touch job I ever had where the growing responsibilities began to
overtake me. This tool allowed me to overtake it instead through development of
adding visual organizational skills to my planning.
Beyond the Visual Enhancements
Rollovers. Rescheduling can be a useful tool that if not focused upon properly,
can get out of hand and lead to loss of time management control. Not that this
will not happen occasionally, but if not handled efficiently, can ruin your
time management progress. So limit your acceptance of Rollovers. There are some
ways to do this.
First, identify likely rollover projects and tasks then solicit
assistance when they are created. The more hands available to keep the project
moving, the easier it is to get it done. The sharing of the responsibilities and
the rewards should not inhibit you. As a leader, your job is to get things
done, not do everything that needs to be done. See the difference? If not, call
me, email me, reach out and let me help you through this concept. It is vital!
Second, limit the amount of Rollovers to a number each week. Try a high
bar, no more than one per week. If you find after a month you seem to get two to
three, lower the bar to just two. The idea is to sharpen your time management
skills, not give in to their lack of development. After two months try to raise
the bar back to one. Under no circumstances should you accept three. If you are
struggling with three or more then again, call me, email me, reach out and let
me help you through this concept. It is vital! Remember, we are working on time
management, as a business leader, this is worth getting right. Moreover, I want
you to go home at the end of the day without the Rollover stress haggling you
all night and stressing you out in the morning commute.
Higher Priority. Big projects that start as high priority and
those that move into that category over time (rollovers, especially, multiple
rollovers) need to be more than Red items. They must be of prime concern to you
and if they are important to you they are important to any team member you can
solicit help from too. Remember, your job, to get things done. No matter what
portion of it is yours to do hands-on, there are other people that can
supplement because they do something better than you do and that is why they
are your employee and/or your team member. Corn does not grow in the silo. It
takes many hands to get it there and even then, is made productive only when it
leaves. Don’t get it? Then call me, email me, reach out and let me help you
through this concept. It is vital!
Transitional Time. One of the greatest number of errors I see
on executive planners is back-to-back items. There are good reasons for listing
some that way. For instance, you are scheduling yourself to take lunch at
noon-1pm then be in the office from 1-2pm and you want to make calls from
1-1:30pm and write emails from 1:30-2pm. That is all good. Just do not let me
catching you scheduling a staff meeting from 2-3pm. Because unless you have the
post lunch water retention of a camel those two cups of coffee are going to be
making you very uncomfortable and somewhat irritable during that staff meeting.
Make transitional breaks to the restroom. Seems silly but I cannot count the
number of times I have seen people escape mid-meeting on account of poor post
lunch planning. My argument is this, if you cannot plan your own time for
personal needs, what makes me think confidently about your critical role on my
team? Enough said.
Notes Filing, post-meeting. Here is my calculation for an organized
office run by an organized leader.
If there is some part of
this calculation that seems confusing, call me, email me, reach out and let me
help you through this concept. It is vital! I am going to raise the bar again
on this on another day and introduce more organizational tools to help you. For
now, let’s try this for a few weeks and see how you do.
Insightfully yours,
Robert
Majdak, Co-Founder
Crystal Majdak, Co-Founder
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