Leadership: Management and time (Part 2)

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Business Coach Nuno F. Assis speaking about leadership and time management

Dear Readers,

In the last post we began to deal with the question of how to find the time in your packed working day in order to manage your subordinates properly. After getting to know the first four levels of development and becoming aware that “managing subordinates” isn‘t something that you do “on the side” – but is rather, if you want to do it properly, something that requires time to prepare and time to do the right things (what exactly these are in detail is something that we will also look at more closely here in the near future). Therefore I‘d like to ask you a question: “How do you succeed in doing a whole day‘s work by 12 noon?” In this post you will now get to know the next steps of the new system that can also help you to finish your work by 12 o‘clock and take the rest of the day off – or invest it in the management of your subordinates!

Why you aren‘t allowed to add more work At the beginning, when you are finished, it will happen that your instinct will mislead you to start more work. Unfortunately, you can‘t do that and indeed you will have to resist this demanding force. Starting more work results in a setback for your new fledgling system, which in turn undermines your self-confidence and conveys to yourself uncertainty with regard to your new system – consciously or unconsciously.

At the start it‘s very important that you learn to trust your new system. If you can‘t rely on the fact that the points on both your lists are also really the right amount of work and contain the most important points you have to deal with, then you will quickly find yourself back in the old rat race and your new system will quickly be a thing of the past. Focusing on these two lists works so well in practice because you aren‘t allowed to start any new work when you‘ve finished the work on the list. Let me make this clear with an example: Imagine you‘re running in a 400-meter race. If you are able to determine the speed yourself and run at the right speed, then you should be totally exhausted right at the end of the race. So you run as fast as possible within 400 meters. Now imagine a 400-meter race but at the moment you go over the finishing line your coach shouts at you to run a further 200 meters. If your coach does this often and regularly, you‘ll set your pace differently and you‘ll start to save a little extra energy for the extra 200 meters. And if this happens in every run, you will have automatically developed and manifested a new running habit.

Your weekly and daily targets function like the 400-meter race described. If, however, you get used to always adding 200 meters when you achieve your targets quickly, then you‘re boycotting your own system. Instead of aiming your energy, your speed and your focus at a series of tasks determined in advance, you‘ll again find yourself with endless to-do lists and 10-hour working days.

Calibrate your weekly and daily targets

My productivity trebled after I began to make a note of my daily targets. The disadvantage of this system, however, is the irregularity right at the start. On some days you‘ll find it very easy to achieve your targets because you‘ll inadvertently have planned these days too low. On other days you‘ll find it incredibly difficult to achieve your targets because on these days you‘ll inadvertently have planned too much and take on too many tasks. The solution for these irregularities doesn‘t consist of giving up and returning again to the “old” unproductive hour-by-hour system. Rather the art lies in learning to calibrate yourself better and finding an appropriate relationship to the amount of work there is to do. As with everything in life you‘ll get better the more often you use and keep to the system in practice and in the course learn to pay attention to how you improve yourself. This “eyesopen” behavior is something I made myself get used to by keeping exact notes and records.

Make a note of your current productivity

When you start to get into your new system and to use it in practice, the best way to calibrate your self is to keep records of the amount of work you get done each day. Quantify your work. Through quantifying your work you have a clear measurement you can use quite easily to measure you own progress. Since a large proportion of my work consists of writing, the best yardstick for me was the number of words I write per day or the number of articles I finish within a day. When I sell, I can count the number of sales discussions I have each day or the number of contacts. On a day when I have to make a lot of phone calls I measure my my work on the basis of the number of calls I‘ve made or the number of minutes I‘ve spent on the phone. Find a way of quantifying your own work, so you can measure it.

Some types of work are easy to quantify and in the case of others you‘ll have to think about it a bit. My experience is that all kinds of work can be quantified. What deters people from doing this or makes it difficult to do so is often the fear of making themselves measurable as a result. Keep a daily log where you enter details of what you‘ve achieved on this day. At the end of the week group the various types of work together and evaluate how much work you‘ve carried out. This only represents your you initial productivity value and serves as an indicator for the coming week. Now on the basis of this initial assessment you can define you daily targets for the next week on a daily basis. As an author I knew that I could write 3,000 to 4,000 words per day when I concentrate only on writing. Or a bit less when I combine it with non-writing tasks. By writing down the daily results of my productivity, I could orient my daily targets with the help of these figures and set my targets accordingly. As a result I also knew that, if I were to write at least 3,000 to 4,000 words a day, I would also be able to achieve my weekly targets and be able to deliver a consistently high quality and quantity. But how do you record this?

When I was getting used to this new system of work, I started every day (after finishing work) to make notes and records where I put down my progress, analyzed setbacks and drew my lessons from them. In order to prevent this getting out of hand I set an alarm clock that went off after 22 minutes. This was the amount of time I had set for myself to carry out this evaluation. Everything I hadn‘t written down during this time was thrown away mercilessly. Through this strict system I simultaneously made myself used to summarizing the essentials within the shortest possible time and giving my weaker self as little room for maneuver as possible. At first I simply used a school exercise book, which I later replaced with a Moleskine notebook.

Why is it important to measure?

When you know what your current productivity looks like in figures, you won‘t find it difficult to adjust to a new system and the figures will convince you more and more. Without the hard figures you run the danger of feeling lazy when you finish early and take the afternoon off. When after a few weeks I compared my old to-do lists with the current results, I became aware that with the new system I was getting 2 to 3 times as much done as before. After that the choice was easy because my productivity figures were obvious. If you‘re an employee, you can also use these figures to show to your boss. In the past when I was an employer, I would have been glad if an employee had been able to show that a new system had increased their productivity in this way on the basis of comprehensible figures – even if it means that they knock off earlier. Today I‘ve adapted this system to each job in my company and found a work system where it isn‘t the time spent at work that counts but targeted results. This system you‘re getting to know here in this posts is the system used for work by myself and all my subordinates in in my company.

Weekly targets

The other element of this productivity system is a list of weekly targets. The advantage of this list of weekly targets it that it doesn‘t have to remain as rigid as the list of daily targets. Through my own application in practice I‘ve found out that the urge to put things off (and the motivation to work) is essentially based on the daily level and fluctuates from day to day. Since at the beginning I caught myself not putting some of my daily targets down on my daily list on the original day but rather putting them off (particularly in the case of the supposedly unpleasant tasks), I extended the system to include the list of weekly targets. The purpose of the weekly targets is to ensure that everything you want to deal with also finds its way onto the list of daily tasks. For many years I kept just the list of daily targets and I got on wonderfully with it. It‘s only two years since I decided to extend the system by the weekly list. By means of the second list I set a limit within which I allowed myself to divide up certain jobs differently, but nevertheless set myself a deadline for dealing with all the jobs on the weekly list. The advantage here was that already after a short time I not only started knocking off at midday when I had fulfilled my list of daily targets but I also began to finish work already for the rest of the week on Thursday as soon as I had fulfilled the list of weekly targets.

An appeal to work less?

Finishing you own day‘s work by midday is only one advantage of the system. It isn‘t my goal to get everything finished by midday. I use the system in order to get the maximum amount of work done each day so that I can achieve the targets I‘ve set for my company. I love my work and so I use the two-list system get more out of this and to have enough time and room for the other things in my life that I also love.

But I also use the system to reduce the amount of work I don‘t like. So if I have to do a job that I don‘t like doing, then the system has really proved its value. It allows me to carry out the “necessary work” quickly and efficiently, work that earlier I wouldn‘t have done at all or that I‘d have postponed indefinitely. In a certain sense the difference in productivity is actually even more noticeable in the case of work you don‘t like. When you like doing a job, it‘s simpler to concentrate on the work without distraction or hesitation. The strength of this two-list system is that it compels you to concentrate and focus when you‘re dealing with jobs you don‘t want to do.

Advice for employers

For me it was at first difficult to to embrace this new way of thinking since I often caught myself thinking how I could double or even treble the results that I‘d achieved in 4 hours by extending them to the whole 8 hours or even to 12 hours. What helped me to do so was reading some books on the subject of biorhythms and reading the book “The Twenty Minute Break” and analyzing my own behavior. It quickly became clear to me that even I – no matter how focused I seemed to be – was distracted again and again or even distracted myself and that I didn‘t succeed in being completely focused for 8 or even 12 hours at a time. In addition, I knew through intensive study of the Pareto Principle that, even if I did succeed in being focused, concentrated and completely free from distraction for the whole time, only 20% of my performance would contribute to 80% of the end result and the remaining 80% would only only contribute to 20% of the result. The same was true for my employees. So I began to ask myself how I would succeed in working a few hours completely concentrated and free from all distraction so that I could achieve the highest level of productivity. For this I analyzed all my targets for the last 15 years. As some of you know, I divide my targets up into different categories. In the course of this analysis I discovered very quickly that I‘d never achieved all the targets set for a year – in fact not even once in all the 15 years. Quite the opposite. The more I undertook the harder it was for me to achieve the respective targets. In the years I started to divide up my targets and to concentrate on fewer targets I achieved much more in comparison with the years when I hadn‘t done this. So concentration on fewer targets led to achieving more targets. In other words, an increase in my productivity. This can be illustrated on the basis of a quite simple example. Let‘s begin with a somewhat provocative exercise: Please just take out a sheet of paper and write down all the successes you‘ve achieved in the last year. No matter how big or small they might be.

Important: Don‘t use any aids such as, for example, diaries or success journals. Write only what you can remember. So off you go. Take a maximum of 30 minutes to do so. So? Did you find the exercise difficult? For most of you probably: YES.

When you‘ve done this, just take a look at your list and count the number of successes you‘ve noted. No matter how good your memory is, I maintain that you‘ve certainly noted a few successes, but only in the rarest cases have you succeeded in noting more than 200 successes. Right? Now imagine that every week when you do your weekly review (I hope you do a weekly review) and your planning for the next week, you prepare a little list of 10 things that you managed to well during the last week, things that were successful, and note them down in a journal. Now my question:

Would you find it hard to prepare this little list and enter it in a journal? Very probably you‘d find it significantly easier than the list you just prepared in the exercise. Right?

If you now do this every week, then at the end of the year you‘ll have 52 entries each with 10 successes. Which makes a total of 520 successes you‘ll have listed. In other words more than twice, if not three times as much as you‘ve just listed – and that despite the fact that you‘ll have concentrated much less than you just did in the exercise. On the basis of this little example you see how quickly you can increase your productivity by concentrating on daily and weekly targets. Remember that it‘s one target to do a whole day‘s work by noon and it‘s another target to fill the newly generated time sensibly by using using an important part of it to prepare the management of your subordinates appropriately. Use the time at the beginning of the new year to just check you own work methods and to call them into question so that you can decide where you can create more room and time to be able to concentrate solely on the management of your subordinates.

Remember: Leadership is action and not position!

Your Coach,

Nuno F. Assis