Leadership - How to manage your time for better results

Welcome back!

Dear readers,

After dealing with the various levels of development to be found among staff, the question now is “How do I best put this into practice?”

What is decisive is that you are in a position to implement your knowledge in practice so that you can provide each member of your staff with the leadership appropriate to their level of development. In the coming issues I will therefore guide you Stepp by step and show you how you can implement the demands of each level of development and thus the demands of leadership on an individual basis. The decisive resource that you should first learn to “budget” and that you have to deal with properly is TIME!

Because in addition to your management activities you also have a host of other things, decisions and activities you have to deal with yourself. In relation to providing leadership your day-to-day business is your greatest challenge. For this reason today we‘ll look at how you can handle the day-to-day business of a complete working day before 12 noon so that you‘ll then have enough time to take care of the leadership of your staff and to prepare yourself sufficiently to do so.

That sounds impossible, doesn‘t it? Again and again people ask me about my own work, organizational and productivity routines. Therefore I‘d like to give you an insight into my own personal work methods. But how do you manage to get the work of a whole day finished by 12 noon? Work that would as a rule take eight hours? And that without getting up at 4 a.m. just to enable you to achieve this? In fact it‘s not all that difficult to get everything finished by 12 noon. If you just added together all the time you waste during work distracting yourself or allowing yourself be distracted plus the time you waste because you’re tired at work plus the time you “procrastinate” (time you “give away” through “put-offitis”), you‘d be astonished how quickly half the working day comes together! So if you succeed in eliminating these times, then you shouldn‘t find it difficult to get your work finished by 12 o‘clock. Now, of course, the real problem lies in actually eliminating the “wasted time.” Many self-help books and seminars on the subject of “Achieving more productivity” look like the simplistic advice of so many dietary consultations, loosely along the lines of “Eat less!”But it‘s precisely in the process of eliminating these wasted time resources that the difficult part of this advice lies hidden. At least at first glance. Here a few small changes in approach are sufficient in order to make it much easier to get rid of this “excess time.”

Get rid of the idea that you‘re being paid by the hour!

If you see work as something that begins at 8 a.m. (or whenever you start work) and ends at 5 p.m. (or whenever you finish work), you‘ll not be able to get everything done by noon. If you measure and evaluate yourself according to the number of hours you‘ve spent working instead of evaluating the work you‘ve really done, you’ll end up back in a prison of time-wasting and “put-offitis.” If while reading the introduction to this article you spontaneously thought that “that can‘t be” and that it must be “some sort of fraud,” then it‘s highly probable that you’re suffering from precisely this problem! Reconstructing your work methods to achieve an improvement so that you can get your work done by noon will indeed then feel like a fraud – because after all you “should” work the whole eight hours. And precisely that is the problem since this attitude and this way of looking at things leads to you developing work methods that “keep you busy” until knocking-off time – even if this means that no lasting results are achieved. The way to resolve this is to recognize that you‘re no longer being paid on an hourly basis. If you’re self-employed, you‘ll probably continue to bill your client for the work done on an hourly basis, but you should give up paying yourself on an hourly basis. And if you‘re an employee, your boss will probably continue to pay you wages or a salary which will conform to the number of hours you‘ve worked and (at least in most cases) he’ll demand that you remain at work until the official knocking-off time. Only that doesn‘t mean that you have to use this framework when considering your own work. It’s important that you achieve a separation in your perception

between “time served” and “results achieved.” The sooner you accept that your returns (no matter whether as an employee or as a self-employed person) come from the amount of “work done” and not from the amount of “time invested,” the sooner you‘ll have a slimmer time schedule. These days the time invested is only of limited relevance for the final customer. Much more important is the result that comes out at the end. Even if some employers, especially in the German-speaking countries, still have difficulties with this altered way of thinking, even these have to admit in the final analysis that the bottom line is that the result of the work is much more the time invested. This means that your time input isn‘t the same as your work output and also doesn‘t have to be. The customer wants to have goods or services that help him to resolve his most pressing problem. How much time is necessary to produce these goods or to carry out these services is only of limited significance. The reason it’s only limited is because in the payment model described a time input that‘s too high leads to significantly higher costs, which in turn have to be reflected in the price. This means that in the final analysis the customer is penalized for the fact that you or your staff are operating with too much “excess time.”

If you are working from your “home office,” you should never work from 8 to 5!

If you are working in a typical office environment (i.e. an environment which places punctuality before performance), it‘ll become a bit more difficult to get your working day finished by noon. But it isn‘t impossible on the contrary. In his world famous book, “The Four- Hour Week: More Time, More Money, More Life,” the successful author, Timothy Ferriss, presents some good suggestions and strategies and describes in detail how in the course of discussion you can help your boss understand why it‘s more sensible to let you work less (measured in the number of hours) if at the same time your results are better. If your company‘s policy consists of – speaking figuratively – “chaining you to your desk” until late afternoon, then I recommend you to read this book. Even if you subsequently decide that all that “won‘t work for you,” you should, nevertheless, read it in order to expand your own intellectual horizons. However, if you work from your own office or even from your own home, then you have no more excuses. You should be aware that planning an eight-hour working day means at the same time wasting valuable hours of your life. If you change your method of evaluating your efforts, then the possibility of managing to complete an eight-hour working day in three to four hours will come within your grasp. Very probably you‘ll even be in a position to multiply the amount and quality of your results – while simultaneously reducing your level of activity. Many people, however, will never master this way of thinking – and that‘s also not such a bad thing. For example, I have a friend who runs a business that‘s doing well. He told me he had worked for more than ten hours on a new product.” He said this and I suggest that he honestly believed that he‘d been “working” all this time. However, through observing his communication pattern I could clearly see that this was not the case. During these ten hours he still had the time to write long contributions to a discussion forum and e mails. He fell into the trap of evaluating his productivity by the extent of the efforts undertaken while doing the work instead of only looking at the results of his work. Of course, it would have “excited less sympathy” if he’d worked for only five extremely productive hours and had then spent the rest of the day taking it easy – but the bottom line would have been that he‘d have had more success and would have been less stressed out.

Pareto or the 80/20 Rule

This phenomenon was already investigated quite some time ago by the Italian scientist Vilfredo Pareto when he was analyzing the distribution of the Italian national wealth. Very quickly he established that a small group possessed the majority of the wealth while the broad mass of the population possessed only a very small proportion of the wealth. Troubled by this insight, he started to study whether this phenomenon had an equivalent in other areas of the economy and life – and he found that it was so: this imbalance extends through more or less all areas of our lives! This is how the Pareto Rule also known as the 80/20 Rule came into being. Essentially the rule says that there‘s always an imbalance between input and output. But the rule contradicts the understanding we‘ve learned and also stands in contradiction to our feelings. Thus we have a paradox of life. Because, although this is logically clear to us, our feelings resist this insight with all their might. You‘ll notice that at the latest when you ask yourself how long you’ve known the 80/20 Rule and then ask yourself where and how often you‘ve used this rule in your own life? Once? In one area? “Congratulations!” But allow me to ask a few questions:

Why not more often?
Why only in one area?
Why not in relation to your handling of time?

Take a deep breath because you‘re in good company. Most people know the rule or have at least heard of it, but only very few are in a position to really implement it in their lives. So let‘s therefore take a look at what you can do in order to change this. Let‘s look at the following tricks for increasing productivity that help me to implement this approach in my work methods:

Focus of the day and of the week

This is the core of my productivity and it‘s my personal key to being able to get a whole day‘s work finished by noon. The idea‘s simple: During the whole day I keep two lists. The first list serves to note every task I want to complete on this day. The second list serves to note every task I want to complete during this week. When I’m finished with all the tasks on the first focus list (the list with the task for this day), I could finish work. When things have got to this point at 11 a.m., then I congratulate myself and treat myself to a small reward such as, for example, an ice cream, a cup of tea, a nap or something similar. If, however, I am still not ready at 9 p.m., I make another cup of coffee and work on. The day only comes to an end when the work‘s finished! That sounds obvious, but it isn‘t how most people work. More commonly it happens that people are finished with their work at 11 a.m. and they then begin to address themselves to another “task” and try to fill the time – after all they‘re being paid until 5 p.m. Or if they aren‘t finished at 6 or 7 p.m., they throw in the towel and go home stressed out and frustrated, with the feeling that they‘ve failed. Instead of being paid for carrying out and completing work, most people try to squeeze work into an eighthour day and to fill this up. When they‘re finished earlier than planned, then they either start another task that they can no longer finish on this day, or they fill up the day by wasting time. And if they finish later than planned, they often give up and systematically destroy their self-confidence. It seems easy to demand that we should be paid after completion, however, in our everyday life it‘s become the done thing to pay for wasted time because this is what‘s more commonly done in practice. If you focus on the first list, then the only thing between you and your recreation and relaxation is your work, not a stretch of time that you simply have to fill because it’s expected of you that you‘ll fill it. Or because you expect it of yourself. By means of this list you deprive yourself of the excuse that there has to be a minimum of time and effort. Now only your most important tasks still separate you from the finish line! It‘s astonishing to see (and to experience yourself) what an incredible amount of motivation this creates. And you need this to resist distraction and to maintain your concentration.

Read more in the next article about how you can get your eight-hour working day finished by noon.

Most cordially,

Your coach Nuno F. Assis